There may be a minimum turnaround specified within the planning rules to allow the driver time to shut the desk down at one end and set the desk up at the other, and like has been said above any additional standing time will help with timetable resilience.
Although Metrolink doesn't publish an exact public timetable, publishing their advertised line frequency and first/last journeys instead, there is an underlying timetable that things like the driver diagrams and rosters will be built upon. If only a minute was given at each end, any slight delay would quickly make the service fall apart, and whilst the passengers might not necessarily notice immediately (in that trams would still be running) you'd probably very quickly start to risk driver break issues, drivers going over their shift, trams having to be turned short of destination to recover time, or taken out of service entirely.
There was a thread recently about resilience vs. efficiency in terms of timetabling on the railway, and there really should be a balance between the two. Too much slack results in over-utilisation of resources from both a tram and driver perspective, whilst high efficiency as stated above will result in services regularly falling apart through late running.
Although Metrolink doesn't publish an exact public timetable, publishing their advertised line frequency and first/last journeys instead, there is an underlying timetable that things like the driver diagrams and rosters will be built upon. If only a minute was given at each end, any slight delay would quickly make the service fall apart, and whilst the passengers might not necessarily notice immediately (in that trams would still be running) you'd probably very quickly start to risk driver break issues, drivers going over their shift, trams having to be turned short of destination to recover time, or taken out of service entirely.
There was a thread recently about resilience vs. efficiency in terms of timetabling on the railway, and there really should be a balance between the two. Too much slack results in over-utilisation of resources from both a tram and driver perspective, whilst high efficiency as stated above will result in services regularly falling apart through late running.
