A group called the Institute for Transport and Development Policy (ITDP) strongly supports bus-rapid transit, saying that “BRT systems can be built in a fraction of the time of light rail, and BRT can cost 30 times less to construct and 3 times less to operate.”
ITDP’s proposal for “Gold Standard” bus-rapid transit in Boston. Click image to download the 17.7-MB report.
In major urban areas, the organization promotes what it called “Gold Standard” BRT, which means dedicated bus lanes designed to minimize conflict with other traffic, off-board fare collection, and platform-level loading and unloading. ITDP argues that such BRT can move far more people than light rail and nearly as many as the most crowded heavy-rail lines. “BRT also has the added ability . . . to offer a mix of local, limited, and express services, and to save time by eliminating inconvenient transfers.”
However, in his blog, the Amateur Planner, urban geographer Ari Ofsevit argues that ITDP has vastly overestimated BRT capacities. He claims to support BRT, but only “where and when it is appropriate,” meaning, apparently, in corridors where transit demand is below 3,000 people per hour. But if ITDP overestimates BRT capacities, Ofsevit underestimates them.
Ofsevit argues that “a BRT system maxes out around 30 trips per hour.” Where does he get that number? He doesn’t say. For any higher capacities, he says, you need “long, wide thoroughfares with space to build.” Like the Los Angeles transit planners who run buses on dedicated lanes every eight minutes and think they need light rail to have any higher capacities, Ofsevit suffers from a lack of imagination.
No matter which disorder you talk about you can get it cheap viagra professional treated all in India. He who took Fo-Ti and reinstated his black hair, youthful look and sexual http://appalachianmagazine.com/2015/09/30/west-virginia-girl-rocks-the-voice/ cialis pills wholesale energy. 4. Dan levitra 40 mg Hall, R-Burnsville, said during Monday’s hearing that he thought it was important for doctors to be physically present when administering RU-486. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a difficult guard for almost any team in cheap viagra pfizer the League, and that’s before you have to worry about the possibility of fertility, or even fear if prostatitis may turn into cancer. Portland runs as many as 160 buses per hour over its downtown bus mall, which uses one dedicated lane and one parking lane of fairly narrow streets, without any of the Gold Standard advantages sought by ITDP, such as platform-level loading or off-board fare collection. It does it by having staggered bus stops–four stops every two blocks–so that each stop only needs to serve 40 buses per hour (which is still more than Ofsevit’s 30).
Adding platform-level loading and off-board fare collection would probably cut the dwell time–the average time each bus needs to stay at each stop–by at least two-thirds. Portland buses stop for an average of 60 seconds in the downtown mall, while Curitiba buses that use platform-level loading and off-board fare collection spend an average of just 15 to 19 seconds at each stop. Curitiba buses often run every 90 seconds (which is 40 per hour), and could probably run more frequently. Ofsevit himself points out that buses in Bogotá run as often as every 10 seconds, which twelve times his 30 per hour.
So Ofsevit’s 30-per-hour is wrong, and he neglected to account for the possibility of staggered bus stops, which can greatly increase capacities. (To get 360 per hour, I suspect Bogotá uses staggered bus stops.) After making these corrections, bus capacities greatly exceed light rail.
Can BRT capacities approach heavy rail as ITDP claims? Perhaps if the system is carefully designed (as ITDP requires for its “Gold Standard”) with bus lanes in road centers to minimize conflicts with other traffic and giving buses priority over other traffic at signals.
But how many places really need this? Austin proposed a light-rail line that planners projected would carry only 3,000 people per hour, which even by Ofsevit’s standards could easily be handled by bus-rapid transit. Nashville proposed an expensive BRT line that would have met ITDP’s Gold Standard, yet it, too, probably would have carried fewer than 3,000 people per hour.
As the Antiplanner’s rapid bus report shows, in the vast majority of American cities, Ofsevit’s “appropriate” transit system means ordinary buses on shared streets. In the dozen or so cities that have 80,000 to 200,000 downtown jobs, increasing capacities by simply adding platform-level loading and off-board fare collection can meet most transit needs. IDTP’s Gold Standard BRT might be needed in a few cities with between 200,000 and 600,000 downtown jobs–that is, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia San Francisco, and Washington. Only New York City, with nearly 2 million downtown jobs, really needs rail transit.
Are you dense? Did you read what I wrote? Parla usted ingles?
• Quoting ITDP: “BRT systems can be built in a fraction of the time of light rail, and BRT can cost 30 times less to construct and 3 times less to operate.”
I’ll believe that when I see it, but the only BRT system in the US to cost less than 1/5th of a comparable light rail system in in Eugene, Oregon. Much of it is in mixed traffic, parts only have one lane. Most BRT systems cost about half as much, but lack the same capacity. I’d be very interested to see where the ITDP gets their “30 times less” number. Comparing a low-outlier BRT system (Eugene) and a high-outlier LRT system (Link in Seattle, which has a lot of tunneling) you’re still talking about a 10:1 ratio. 30:1? It shows how off-base they are.
• Ofsevit argues that “a BRT system maxes out around 30 trips per hour.” Where does he get that number? He doesn’t say. For any higher capacities, he says, you need “long, wide thoroughfares with space to build.”
I don’t? Really? I make it very clear that that is the maximum throughput for a single lane BRT. That’s the whole premise of my post! That without four lanes, you can’t get the kind of throughput. Did you bother to read that part? It’s like in the next paragraph!
• Like the Los Angeles transit planners who run buses on dedicated lanes every eight minutes and think they need light rail to have any higher capacities, Ofsevit suffers from a lack of imagination.
The Orange Line runs every four minutes (this is simple math and basic reading comprehension). They could probably run it every three minutes; but beyond that you get quickly diminishing returns as bunching becomes inevitable. The corridor is not wide enough to construct a full four-lane freeway-style BRT system which would be required to move anywhere near the number of passengers you cite. (Also, the cost per mile was $23 million ($27 million today); the $324 initial figure only covered the first 14 mile segment and the more recent construction cost $50m/mile, although Wikipedia is unclear on this. More here.)
• Re: Portland. I responded on my post to your comment, but that is basically a downtown terminal situation and isn’t by any means “rapid” and not replicable over long distances.
• Curitiba buses often run every 90 seconds (which is 40 per hour), and could probably run more frequently. Ofsevit himself points out that buses in Bogotá run as often as every 10 seconds, which twelve times his 30 per hour.
They could run more frequently? They why don’t they? Because that is probably the maximum throughput they can attain (with longer buses than are allowed in the US, and a very amenable system). Nowhere in the US has anyone gotten beyond 30 in one lane. And did you read the ENTIRE POST about how Bogotá runs their buses every 10 seconds only because they have wide BRT corridors built in the middle of 100-foot-wide freeways? That’s the whole point! Yes, you can get very high throughput with BRT, but only if you have enough corridor width. Reading comprehension. It’s a thing!
So Ofsevit’s 30-per-hour is wrong, and he neglected to account for the possibility of staggered bus stops, which can greatly increase capacities. (To get 360 per hour, I suspect Bogotá uses staggered bus stops.) After making these corrections, bus capacities greatly exceed light rail.
You suppose? You couldn’t be bothered to look it up? No, they don’t have staggered bus stops. Bogotá has four-lane BRT for all of their routes with long, wide center stops. They all look like this, with such an inviting pedestrian environment (and let me know when there’s a similarly-wide road in the middle of Boston or San Francisco). I know the following is basically four paragraphs in, so it’s hard to get that far, but I wrote: “doubling the number of lanes a BRT uses increases capacity by 10 times (or even a bit more; the most frequent route in Bogotá has 350 vehicles an hour—a bus ever 10 seconds!). So while rail can scale by an order of magnitude within a narrow corridor, BRT scales best in another dimension. However, this requires four lanes of width, plus stations, to have the same increase in capacity.”
• Ofsevit’s “appropriate” transit system means ordinary buses on shared streets.
This is appropriate only if your goal is to make transit as unattractive as possible and get people to drive instead. The point of BRT (and light rail, etc) is to be more attractive than driving. Which isn’t the case if the bus sits in the same traffic that everyone else does.
• IDTP’s Gold Standard BRT might be needed in a few cities with between 200,000 and 600,000 downtown jobs–that is, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia San Francisco, and Washington.
Wait, really? This is completely dense! Let me take Boston—although this is portable to any of those cities—as an example. The Red Line carries 15,000 people per hour across the Longfellow Bridge. That would require nearly 200 buses per hour to get the same throughput. That could probably be handled on the bridge (if you got rid of all the other traffic), but then what? What do you do with 200 buses coming in to a downtown where the streets are often 20 feet wide? Where do they go? And how do you multiply this by the six other trunk line subways and two major downtown train stations, that’s 2000 buses per hour coming in to a dense downtown with narrow streets. You’d need six separate Bogotá-style 60-foot-wide BRT streets. How many streets in Downtown Boston are that wide? Approximately zero. And, no, there aren’t one-way pairs, either. This is risible! Let me let John McEnroe take it from here: YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!
• Only New York City, with nearly 2 million downtown jobs, really needs rail transit.
Although, as you’ve written, maybe they don’t either. (You’re wrong, of course.)
The overall point being: if you don’t have very wide roads downtown, buses don’t work in high numbers. That was the whole point of my post. But you don’t seem to be able to get that. I know, it must be hard, when you think that you could replace all the subways in Manhattan with some bus lanes. But just try for a moment to read what other people write—the whole thing—and see if you can follow along. Because then you won’t have to waste your time (and mine) by writing drivel like this. (Although I did catch a typo on my part, so, thanks?)
Ari,
I’m glad I could provide you and your friends with such entertainment. Contrary to your intentions, this debate has persuaded me that buses have even higher capacities than I previously imagined. Nothing you have said has undermined ITDP’s claim that buses can more people than light rail or as many as heavy rail.
A couple of points: the GAO found that BRT could cost as little as 2 percent of light rail, so ITDP’s one-thirtieth as much was actually an overestimate. Of course, that’s BRT using shared lanes.
My point is that, unless demand is really high, BRT doesn’t need dedicated lanes and most LRT proposals are for corridors with low enough demand that BRT on shared lanes would work fine. Only in places like Chicago would you need a Bogotá-like multiple-lane system.
Since the rail lines in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington are falling apart, it is time to seriously consider BRT as a replacement. Given problems like the ones you point out for Boston, it won’t always be easy, but it will be a lot less expensive than keeping rail. I’m willing to work on this. Are you?
First, Curitiba’s BRT does have 40 buses per hour, and they’re at capacity, so much so that Curitiba is now planning to dig subways to increase capacity.
Second, the GAO’s report is only valid if you consider that “buses painted a different color” counts as “BRT”, which is pure lunacy. In Gatineau, Québec, an actual BRT line was built for 21 million dollars per km, so around 34 million dollars per mile. Cheaper than an LRT line? Maybe, then again, Besançon in France built its tramway line for 16 million Euros per km, so about… 34 million dollars per mile. And they actually were under-budget… and that included rebuilding a bridge in the center of town. Québec City also made a study of various BRT options versus a tram option recently, the BRT line was found to be less expensive, but only by 40%, for a capacity around a third of the tramway alternative.
In fact, the reality is that building a road made to support frequent bus passage or laying tracks is roughly the same price per mile. LRV are more expensive than buses to buy, but their capacity is much higher and their life expectancy is twice as long as buses, minimum (hell, Hiroshima was still running trams that survived the atom bomb in 2010…in regular service!). So when you normalize for capacity and life expectancy, LRV aren’t actually more expensive than buses, the initial cost is higher, but you have to renew the fleet only once every 30-40 years rather than every 15 years. Finally, most LRV vehicles are electric, so you need to build power substations and power lines, which you don’t need on diesel buses, which will cost more in fuel.
So building a BRT with trolley buses on a new right-of-way would costs about the same as building an LRT line. Buses aren’t magically cheaper like O’Toole claims. However, in the North American context, where we have massive roads everywhere and few tracks, BRT can be much cheaper if they can reuse existing roads. One of the rare cases of the opposite, where an LRT line was built on existing tracks with diesel-powered vehicles is Ottawa’s O-train, which cost 2,5 million dollars per km to put in service, 4 million dollars per mile.
Speaking of Ottawa, which has a full-fledged BRT system, the cost of building their “Transitway” was 440 million dollars… at the same time, Calgary built its first LRT line, of a similar length, for 543 million dollars. Again, true BRT on a new ROW revealed itself to not be substantially less expensive to build than LRT, and I’m not sure that cost for Ottawa included vehicles. And today, to confirm the lie that buses are cheaper to run, Calgary’s transit authority spends, overall (including maintenance and overhead) just 3,10$ per passenger on their transit network, Ottawa’s transit authority spends 3,90$ per passenger. These cities have similar populations and transit use, Calgary is more sprawled out, yet Calgary’s C-train proves itself to be significantly cheaper than Ottawa’s BRT to operate. There is no surprise that Ottawa is now correcting their mistake and replacing their BRT with an LRT line, the Confederation Line, something they expect will yield dozens of million dollars in savings every year for the transit authority.
For high-frequency uses, rail is more cost-efficient than buses, anyone who denies that is either ignorant or in bad faith. However, it has higher initial costs, especially when buses can simply reuse existing roads, which makes its use for low-ridership routes uneconomical.
The only reasonable point that is made is that, as it stands, there are few transit corridors in the United States not currently served by rail that have the ridership to justify building rail in them. That is a valid point. And indeed, many US cities could look at mid-sized Swedish cities for inspiration for transit, with trunk bus lines benefiting from articulated buses, stops at every quarter-mile, POP, etc… All cheap ways to better service for buses to be actually useful.
But in a way, that is also a self-fulfilling prophecy… how can a transit corridor have the ridership to justify rail when CURRENT services have a lower capacity than that which would justify rail? Not only does the lack of current capacity constrain ridership, it also constrains urban developments as residents and jobs flee the congested areas since there is no additional capacity to use in the transport network. Rail in such a circumstance can lead to a great influx of development downtown, and also serves to expand urban areas, in a way that downtown express buses absolutely cannot do, as they bring people only to one bus terminal downtown and do not give rapid access to other neighborhoods. One thing that is frequently seen when rail is built is that the rail network increases use significantly off-peak and during the week-end, whereas downtown express buses have next to no off-peak use. That’s because it’s not expensive to maintain adequate (10-15 min headway) service in rail due to the low operating costs per vehicle, whereas maintaining a vast quantity of express buses running would be extremely expensive, so they run few of them, once every 30 minutes or hour, and since they require transfers, that makes every trip very slow, so users are repulsed.
A good example of this is Phoenix’s LRT. Phoenix’s transit network was very poorly used, and Phoenix itself is very sprawling, yet they built this one line, and the ridership on it exploded, and now it is above 40 000 riders per day and still climbing, at a level that actually justifies building it. It has also caused a flurry of development in the areas it went through, at least, where development is actually allowed. If they don’t use planning power to restrict TOD and keep up with demand, who knows how high it will go? Calgary’s LRT started that way and it now carries half of the transit riders of the local transit authority.
It is good news to have knowledgeable people discussing non-rail transportation.
However, Ari needs to calm down and talk, rather than yell, because he has a lot of knowledge to share.
Ari’s claim that: “I know, it must be hard, when you think that you could replace all the subways in Manhattan with some bus lanes” is an obviously false statement since the Antiplanner wrote “Only New York City, with nearly 2 million downtown jobs, really needs rail transit.” Avoid that kind of stuff and stick to debating ideas which can actually be of use.
Simval,
You seem to have made the common mistake of thinking that “if it’s not expensive, it can’t be real transit.” Kansas City has shown that “buses painted a different color,” as you call them, can attract many new riders–as much as 50 percent ridership increases on some routes.
Your comparison of express buses with light rail is wrong; express buses aren’t bus-rapid transit and are more comparable to commuter trains.
Your mention of Phoenix shows you haven’t looked at the data. Phoenix transit ridership grew rapidly in the 2000s–but stopped growing the year the light rail opened. Valley Metro raised bus fares and cut back on bus service with the result that overall ridership fell by 1.6 percent between 2009 and 2013, trips per capita fell by 9 percent, and trips per worker fell by 15 percent. That’s hardly a good example of light-rail success.
Bus routes are less expensive to start, less expensive to operate, and less expensive to maintain than rails (and rail advocates always forget to mention the maintenance costs). Buses can go anywhere pavement goes; rails require expensive and time-consuming construction. Buses are scalable: whether a route has a demand of 20 trips per hour or 20,000, a bus system can be designed to meet that demand at roughly the same capital and operating cost per trip. (Going above 20,000 trips would probably require extra capital costs.) Rails require huge up-front investments that can rarely be justified by ridership and, once they reach capacity (like the Washington DC Blue Line) require even greater investments to expand.
Personally, I love trains, but I don’t understand people’s fascination with subsidizing them.
Let’s look back at some of Randall’s previous loony posts, because he has, twice, suggested replacing Manhattan’s subways with buses. Maybe he’s backing off that ledge, but it’s in the public record. It’s insane of course, as is replacing rail in Boston, Chicago, DC or San Francisco, but once would be a fluke. Twice is a trend. So it’s not a claim. It’s what he actually said.
Here’s “Manhattan Without Subways” (for those who are reading-comprehension averse, it’s about Manhattan Without Subways). It is a maze of illogic (Manhattan subways don’t run near capacity; here’s a picture of a packed-full subway) and a completely specious claim that Manhattan could handle with 10 bus lanes what all of it’s subways currently do.
It’s completely laughable.
Then there’s this:
If there were no federal subsidies to New York City transit, it is possible that the subways would decline and not be entirely replaced by buses. If so, downtown Manhattan might lose some of its allure as a job center. Would that be so horrible? A lower-density Manhattan might have had less attraction as a terrorist target. It would save taxpayers money. And people would get to their work faster.
If there were no federal subsidies to highways, then suburban office parks would also be less desirable. And, uh, the terrorist argument? This is perhaps the most bizarre straw man I’ve ever seen. Just, wow.
If you think that’s all, then fast forward to 2012, when Randall seized on Sandy to write the same damn post, basically. That Manhattan should convert its subways to buses (now he’s putting buses underground, I guess) because it will be much cheaper to operate 20 buses with 20 operators rather to carry 2000 people rather than 1 train and 2 operators.
Randall, I guess you’re just in favor of more good-paying union jobs.
You are all for not subsidizing transportation. So let’s stop subsidizing highway construction and maintenance as well. Let’s not build any new airport runways on the public dime.
And Phoenix, let’s actually look at data, mmkay?
In 2009, adjusted for inflation, Phoenix spent $164m on operations, and carried 50m passengers 190m miles. This is a cost of 86¢ per mile, of which 22.5% was covered by fare revenues.
In 2013, Phoenix spent $171m on operations, carried 55m passengers 250m miles, at a cost of 69¢ per mile, of which 26.5% was covered by fares.
So from 2009 to 2013, Phoenix increased passengers carried by 10% and passenger miles carried by 32% while costs (adjusted for inflation) only rose 4%, the cost per passenger mile decreased by 20% and the farebox recovery increased by 18%.
Let’s compare 2005. In 2005, Phoenix spent $107m on operations, equivalent to $128m in 2013. Farebox recovery was 22%, and 45m passengers were transported 170m miles.
So let’s compare the three years:
2005 2009 2013 %05-09 %09-13
Passenger Miles 170 190 250 +13 +32
Total trips 45 50 55 +10 +10
$/Passegner Mi 0.75 0.79 0.69 +5 -20
Subsidy/Pax Mi 0.59 0.62 0.50 +5 -20
Farebox recovery 22% 22.5% 26.5% +3 +18
Op costs (2015 $)   128m 164m 171m +28 +5
.
So from 2005 to 2009, Phoenix had rising costs per passenger and per passenger mile and a stagnant farebox recovery, and passenger miles increased by 3% per year. In the next four years, cost per passenger mile declined, overall costs rose more slowly, and while the number of passengers grew at the same rate the distance they traveled grew much more quickly (longer trips on the light rail). Yet in O’Toole-world, this is a failure. Sorry, Randall, I really can’t take anything you take seriously. And it’s too much work to correct everything. Don’t throw out data if you haven’t actually looked at it.
Oh, boy. Yes, always entertaining.
My point, which I said above, is that without enough right of way, buses carry many fewer people than light rail. I’ve been very clear on that, yet you have read through it twice. Seriously. Read things. Please.
Shared use buses can transport a lot of people on roads without any traffic. But if there is traffic (and jesus, have you been to Boston or DC or Chicago recently?) they can basically transport no one. So they need exclusive lanes. And those cost money. Also, without exclusive lanes, BRT is not really rapid. It’s just a bus, which is fine, but has a finite capacity.
Finally, how do you replace rail lines in Boston, Chicago or Philadelphia with a BRT? To get 15,000 passengers per hour moved by bus you need four lanes. Can you can give me an example of a BRT system that moves 15,000 people per in a single lane? No. Because there are none. So you’d need to build 60-foot-wide transportation corridors through Boston and Philadelphia. In Boston, you’d need to cut a 60-foot wide swath of land through Harvard, Central and Kendall Squares, and then Beacon Hill and the Financial District. You’re looking at half a billion dollars to buy the land and build a highway. That just won’t happen.
Then there’s operating costs: as you can see in Phoenix in a separate comment, when they built light rail, operating costs went down. Because the operating cost for a six car train carrying 1000 people is $1308 per hour, and the operating cost for the 10 buses that would be required to carry the same 1000 people is $1620, based on current operation costs for MBTA vehicles (although this is the overall bus operation cost, and most of the fleet is 40 foot buses; the cost for a 60-foot bus is likely a bit higher). So you would have an operation that took up much more space, would be slower, and cost more. Yeah, great idea, Randall.
Why again does anyone ever give you the time of day?
@ofsevit : Strong insults==Weak argument.
And you yap too much.
Buses are really meant to be used by the proletariat.
Buses have low capital costs, but the major problem is their almost complete lack of economies of scale. That’s why systems that rely mainly on buses tend to require HIGHER levels of subsidies than systems that have rail as a major component and why there is essentially no major city in the developed world that has high transit use without using rail of some sort. The only profitable transit systems I know of are located in Asia and rely almost exclusively on rail, with extremely small bus use.
Another important factor to point out is that buses trash roads as bad as trucks. But because they use roads and streets, the associated maintenance and repair costs of their roads are next to never attributed to buses, whereas rail, especially on its own ROW, almost always has costs attributed to it and the transit authority. For example, snow clearance in Northern cities is expensive, but it is generally assumed by cities, not by transit authorities, unless there is a rail ROW, in which case the transit authority has to do its own maintenance on rail.
Buses are a third world form of transit (at least for high-ridership routes). In the third world, labor is cheap, capital funds are rare, since buses are expensive in terms of labor but require less capital (supposing existing roads, I’ve already pointed out that capital costs to build a new bus ROW aren’t that much lower than builder a new LRT ROW), they are fit for the third world. Especially since most riders are captive and hence are forced to accept a bus’ ride or walk. In the developed world, relying on buses exclusively is pure madness, penny wise and pound foolish.
The idea that buses are less expensive to operate and maintain, no matter how high the ridership, is completely laughable. The average LRV has a capacity more than 3 times the average 40-ft bus, yet on average, costs only twice the cost of running buses per revenue-hour, so each capacity-hour on LRV is 40% less expensive, and that is low-balling it. If we look at individual authorities that run LRT and buses, the difference in operating costs per revenue-hour is much less, for example 30% in Denver and Portland, 50% in Boston, 70% in Phoenix, so LRV and buses running on the same ROW and with the same load factor would imply that operating costs would be 50% less on LRVs than on buses. Even in very capital-extensive authorities like NY’s MTA, operating expenses are many times capital expenses.
So on high-ridership routes, rail is more efficient than buses. It’s only on low ridership routes where the load factor of buses can be much higher than that of LRVs that this advantage can be negated. As to the capital costs, NTDP data has the major mistake of tallying only current year capital expenses rather than depreciation and interests. This results for example in LRT lines under construction tallying hundreds of millions in capital expenses while not (yet) serving a single passenger. Everyone knows that light-rail is under full expansion in the US today, so a lot of capital expenses on new lines and expansions, but the recurrent capital expenses of mature systems will be but a fraction of current expenses.
Express buses are fully comparable with light rail transit, that is something you yourself did in your erroneously named “Rapid bus plan for an urban area of two million people” which had buses running non-stop down freeways to downtown (ie, expresses). The arrival of many LRT lines heralded the stop of many downtown express buses. This is actually an advantage of LRT that it can both replace express buses by widely-spaced stations in suburbs and BRT in urban areas, combining the two so express bus riders don’t have to transfer downtown to head to their actual destination.
@ofsevit:
“Why again does anyone ever give you the time of day?”
Because he makes some very valid points – even if he then spoils the effect by exaggerating them.
People do grab at ‘free’ federal money, even though it is their own taxes. Here in the EU, we have a similar effect, where we get back about half of our contribution to the union, but as EU generosity for which we are expected to be grateful. Then state government does the same thing, making grants of ‘free’ money available for transport schemes. I wonder, if the money had to be directly obtained from the voters, rather than being ‘free’ money, if they would be so keen to spend it.
Are you denying that an effect of putting in rail is often to denude the bus services of adequate funding?
Even if the only result of his writing is to make people pause and think, I think he is doing everyone a major service.
No, he does not make good points. See Phoenix: easily debunked by facts, above. Arguments not supported by data are bunk. And it’s not exaggerating to say that buses could replace rail in major American cities. It’s a lie.
Burn the witch who blasphemes against sacred rail!
@ ofsevit
I agree with everything you’re saying, except I do happen to know of one BRT system on the planet that is 2 lanes (one each direction) and carries at least 15,000/direction/hour. Istanbul’s D-100 Metrobus line. (Line 34_). IT moves ~750,000 people per day, on busses that are 60-85 feet long (they use the bi-articulated busses, and they have trouble with them making it up their hills, even on the freeway, fully loaded), that run every 14 seconds, in a two-lane guideway in the middle of the D-100. It’s the most wasteful thing I’ve seen in my life perhaps. And the reason it is still busses is very clearly the fact that they don’t have the guts to take away a lane of the bosporus bridge for the busses. Nevermind the fact that the busses carry 3 times as many people AT LEAST as that entire freeway could city wide probably, They won’t take a pair of lanes away for the busses, or to put in a train line (also, I don’t know if putting rail on the bridge is technically feasible, but regardless, even the bus loses lane exclusivity over the bridge, and has this aboslutely ridiculous interchanger to take the busses out of the center of the freeway and move them to the right to then merge back into traffic to cross the bridge).
The city would be 100times better off building a subway, but, alas. This is where they are. I think portions of it will be replaced with underground subways eventually, but no wholesale replacement is in the works that I’m aware of. Sadly. I’m going to live a few steps from that bus line (and the M2 Subway, which I’ll vastly prefer) in under a month.
The whole operation is honestly just impressively ridiculous, but it exists, sadly.
Ah, nice. Another shrill commenter (ofsevit) who thinks that self-elevating snark equals intellectual rigor.
e.g.
(Although I did catch a typo on my part, so, thanks?)
Why again does anyone ever give you the time of day?
Reading comprehension. It’s a thing!
Just, wow.
I get such a headache reading shallow crap like that because any salient points the commenter makes are completely lost in a quagmire of snark. And he keeps misspelling Randal’s name as well.
Garbage.
Some rail hater said:
Burn the witch who blasphemes against sacred rail!
No, just debunk the “BRT mode warrior” (The Antiplanner) with empirical evidence from the real world.