Trams may never stop at traffic lights under future people-moving plans for Melbourne

The trams on the world's largest network may never have to stop for traffic lights under plans being developed to deal with population growth in Melbourne, a senior traffic official said on Friday.

Currently 80 percent of Melbourne's trams share the roads with cars. With the city's population set to reach 8 million in less than 40 years, Victoria's state road authority VicRoads is trailing new systems for traffic flow with mathematical modeling.

"We've used the model to assess what happens if we, for example, give absolute priority to the tram, which means that when a tram gets to a set of traffic signals, it never has to stop," VicRoads director of network policy and standards Andrew Wall told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"The model lets us look at those sort of situations, so it's giving us some insights into how hard we can push the traffic signal system to give priority to trams," he said.

Wall said VicRoads needed to look at "clever ways to move people around the network" and thus trams were the focus of future planning due to their ability to carry far more people than cars.

"The focus on moving people is probably the critical thing for us," he said. "We want to set the road network up and the traffic signals up so we're maximizing how many people we move, not necessarily how many vehicles."

The Melbourne tram network is one of the slowest in the world, with the sluggish average speed of 16 km an hour dropping to a lackluster 11 km per hour in the CBD.

In November, a transport industry group said trams could provide a much bigger role in the city if they spent much less than 17 percent of their journey time at traffic lights. Endi