Our weekly roundup of new and newsworthy transportation projects around the world.

Rotterdam Centraal Station Opens

On March 13, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands officially opened Rotterdam’s new Centraal Station. The renovated station, nine years in the making and costing 633 million euros to build, features an angular headhouse jutting out from the corner of a large, ground-level train shed. While architecture is what catches the eye, the endeavor is first and foremost about transit capacity: 110,000 people pass through the 11-plus-acre site each day, a number expected to triple by 2025, rendering the old, 1950s-era station obsolete. Rotterdam Centraal’s traffic is growing in large part due to the introduction of two new services: HSL-Zuid, a high-speed railway that connects the city to the rest of Europe, and the RandstadRail light rail network.

RandstadRail is a peculiar subway-light rail hybrid that connects Rotterdam with the Hague via frequent metro-like service and interfaces seamlessly into the city’s more traditional metro. In a Dutch variation on the tram-train model pioneered in Karlsruhe, some underground stations have tracks that split in two, with high-level platforms for regular metro trains along one track, and another platform closer to the trackbed for low-floor trams. This allows planners to merge the otherwise-incompatible light rail and metro networks for seamless trips across the region, without building expensive underground or elevated stations in the suburbs or redundant light rail trunk lines in the city.

Rotterdam Centraal is the first of five new stations going up in cities across the Netherlands, with Amsterdam, Utrecht, the Hague and Breda also slated to receive some of the 1.5 billion euros that the government and national rail operator have set aside for the new structures.

Rubber Meets the Road with French Tramway

Paris’ fast-expanding tramways, which serve 700,000 trips each weekday, are hitting ridership projections far too soon. The T5 — a bizarre rubber-tire tramway that runs through the city’s poor, immigrant-heavy northern suburbs — was estimated to eventually carry between 30,000 and 36,000 passengers a day. But after not even six months of operation, it’s seeing loads of 44,000 a day, requiring the purchase of more vehicles.

While its success no doubt comes as good news, the high ridership rate may expose flaws in the T5’s proprietary rubber-tire design, an unfortunate choice foisted on an unwilling operator by local officials. Not only are Translohr trams — trolleybuses guided by a single rail — more expensive and slower than conventional two-rail trams, but their seating capacity and even highest frequency are worse than standard light rail. The government is now vender-locked into the inferior Translohr technology, and the tramway cannot connect to other systems to make it more useful.

Wharf Extension Could Redeem San Francisco’s Central Subway

San Francisco’s Central Subway isn’t any transit advocate’s idea of a good subway project. Rumored to have been conceived in an election endorsement deal between Chinatown powerbroker Rose Pak and then-mayor Willie Brown, the Central Subway’s design is riddled with flaws. While the corridor is one of the more important transit thoroughfares in the city — it connects the T-Third modern light railway with the current Caltrain terminal and then ducks underneath Market Street to head toward Chinatown — it was not the most important in the city by any measure. Investment and improvement probably should have been in the form of bus lanes or a dedicated light railway, not a full-fledged underground line.

But what’s (almost) done is done. The project could, however, earn a bit of redemption with a northward extension from Chinatown, with stations in North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf. These would serve dense residential neighborhoods and tourist attractions without any of the design flaws that trouble the rest of the line (aside from the expensive tunneling aspect). Transit advocates have been pushing for the extension for years, and they won a small battle when the city committed to a feasibility study. Tunneling on the subway has already progressed significantly, though, so any moves toward an extension — engineering and funding — must come quickly.