Holding on during your journey is important because unexpected incidents can happen.
Torrens Connect takes pride in its ability to provide an uneventful journey to customers. And that’s the norm. When your ride is always smooth, it’s easy for customers to forget that incidents can happen.
You might never experience it, even if you’re a regular commuter – and we hope you don’t. The incidents are rare but there are times when trams have to brake. Hard. And unexpectedly.
Incidents that have happened include cars performing illegal U-turns and pedestrians (on mobiles or wearing earphones) suddenly stepping onto tracks in front of trams.
It’s scary for everyone involved including the operator and passengers.
And trams are big. Famous interstate advertising campaigns (we love them too!) tell us that a tram weighs about as much as 30 rhinos. For those of us who like numbers, Adelaide’s trams weigh about 40 tonnes. When a tram is travelling at 50 km/h, it will stop in approximately 30 m under emergency braking. That takes just over 4 seconds.
It was Sir Isaac Newton who gave us inertia – the resistance of an object to any change in its speed or direction (you might recall this if you studied high school physics). That means that the tram might be stopping very quickly, but anything inside will still tend to travel at 50 km/h (over 13 m per second). That means you.
You can fall quite a distance when a tram suddenly brakes.
This is why there are signs and announcements asking you to hold on.
Please do!
Because Torrens Connect wants everyone to get to where they need to go safely.
Blame Newton…