It could be that a patch of concrete has higher snow removal expense than a railroad roadbed.
On the other hand, a street-running portion of a light rail line or a streetcar line is the worst of both worlds from the standpoint of road/guideway maintenance. When you see these movie clips of Bonfire of the Vanities (the burning of books deemed to be morally bad) of destruction of streetcars by setting fire to them when they were replaced with buses, the implication is that there was this Vast Concrete and Diesel Bus Conspiracy. Maybe the “town fathers” publically torched streetcars in an expression of “good riddance” of having to maintain streets with rails in them.
If there is some advantage of a railroad roadbed over a concrete slab for dedicated right-of-way segments of a route, perhaps some bimodal system discussed on another thread would be in order.
It seems that there are some so dedicated to steel-on-steel that the Alweg Monorail along with the Paris and Montreal subway are suspect. Perhaps BART is also suspect because it is of a non-standard broad gauage.
It’s been a while since I’ve done my broken record, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. My opinion is that anything that gets people out of their automobiles will help rail transit.
Bus Rapid Transit does not mean doom for rail.
National City Lines was not the cause of streetcar abandonments, although its owners GM, Esso, etc… may have been a cause because they fed peoples’ auto addiction.
I agree, but my initial post questions not the doom of existing rail, but a potential for planners to migrate away from any new rail projects (fresh construction, not extentions) in favor of BRT. I already see a movement within the FTA towards funding many more BRT projects than rail projects.
As a taxpayer, maybe this isn’t such a bad deal.
LRT/LRV in a dedicated right of way is far speedier for the passenger than sitting in a car or vanpool (in most cases), but a bus on either a dedicated ROW or a dedicated lane with traffic light priority isn’t all that far behind (in theory, anyway). Getting the ROW set aside for a new dedicated ROW is tough in either case, but the flexibility of building a “bus corridor” that opens up into a network of routes that fan out to various outlying destinations might help speed longer distance commuters into the city (ie. the dedicated XBL of the Lincoln Tunnel)
While planners recognize that buses have a (generally) shorter service life, this spreads the cost out over time and makes the intial price tag lower (the planner may have moved on to greener pastures by the time the fleet needs to be replaced so politically, it’s not his or her problem to deal with)
However, as a traffic safety person, I hate to see a pair of travel lanes sit unused except for the occasional express bus. Opening that lane to all traffic really doesn’t help congestion that much, but maybe the people sitting in their guzzler cars will see the bus zip by and figu
Routes? What routes? There is one O-bahn route, singular, in Adelaide. And it was nothing more than a politically-motivated quick fix. It has never been extended, whereas the Glenelg tramway has been, and will be further extended, as well as getting new rollingstock. Electrification of the Adelaide suburban railway network has also been approved.
Not my assertion, it was the finding of a series of studies carried out by the Service des ponts et chaussées some years back, comparing tramways to BRT, of which France has both.
Tracks in streets, rail lanes shared as auto and general traffic lanes, are not “the worst of all worlds” and do not pose difficult maintenance problems with modern technology. The “downtowns” of plenty of European cities, plus Toronto in North America, prove otherwise. The old lumbering two-motored deck-roof (usually) heavyweight slow accelerating and impossible to stop quickly in wet weather streetcar was a pain in the neck for automobile drivers, but lightweight cars with magnetic track brakes and then the PCC solved that problem pretty neatly. There probably is no advantage either way in speed between a modern bus and a modern streetcar running in mixed traffic in city streets. Ditto electric buses or trackless trolleys. But isn’t it interesting that the Ballard route in Seattle had a terrific jump in patronage just because electric buses, trackless trolleys, replaced diesels on the route? So there is something about the smoothness and quietness of electricity that attracks riders. In case after case when relatively modern streetcars were pulled of the streets and replaced by buses, patronage fell, and I saw this happen with the Broadway-42nd Street line in Manhattan at age 14 at the end of 1946.
In terms of costs, light rail, particularly light rail in streets or on its own surface or elevated right-of-way, cost way way more than bus lanes. But as can be verified by pulling up the website of the American Public Transit Association, operating costs per passenger mile are considerably lower, averaged across all operators, for light rail than for buses, although there are exceptions. Heavy rail rapid transit has the least cost, and commuter rail varies too much from case to case to make a really meaningful average. Its spread goes all the way from as efficient as heavy rail rapid transit to less efficient than bus.
Are you making a causality mistake? Are you sure that the patronage drop was a result of the bustitution, or was it due to postwar automobile ownership increase and flight to suburbia? What ridership changes did other lines in New York City and the nation experience? What were the population and employment changes at the time?
Multiple bus routes use the O-bahn or Adelaide Rapid Bus right-of-way to get from the central business district to outlying areas. They enter it just outside of the central business district. At points along the right-of-way it expands into a station plaza. Some of the buses leave the O-bahn at the plaza and run routes through neighborhoods. Others continue on to the next plaza, where they repeat the process, while others run to the end of the O-ban, where they too repeat the process.
One clear advantage of the system is that it allows people to stay on the same vehicle, whe
One comment I heard from somebody involved in transit developements here (the UK) was to the effect that BRT was ‘cheaper’ than LRT because it had lower standards, and that if you built it on like for like basis, the price would be comparable.
but what would be your reason for building it on like for like basis? If you never intend to run rail then you have no need to build overpasses stong enough to handle rail vehicles which would probably be heavier than buses.
daveklepper mentioned that tunnels probably are more expensive for buses because of clearance or guidance issues. That should also apply to underpasses, so maybe if you’ve got a mix of under and overpasses then whatever you saved on building cheap overpasses you’d lose because the bus needs wider underpasses than rail.
Of course you could dispense with grade separated road crossings, but then you’re losing some of the rapid aspects of the RT system.
On the other hand you may be stymied if one day you want to convert to rail and all of your overpasses are built to bus standards.
I doubt he’s making a “causality mistake”, as you term it. If the automobile had such a profound influence, it would have been reflected in all forms of public transportation and not one mode (street transportation whether rail or bus). There was a marked difference between the streetcar usage and the usage of the buses that replaced them (of course, it was no help that the buses had lower passenger capacity than the streetcars, but it was also the case that the buses did not have the same kind of “dedicated” space that the streetcars previously commanded; drivers like to keep out of the streetcars’ way even when the lanes are shared, and that makes them more effective as a street-bound form of public transportation, because car drivers just don’t respect buses, especially when they’re trying to pull back into traffic from a stop at a curb).
And what’s making you relate “automobile ownership” with “flight to suburbia” in particular? That sounds more to me like a matter related to commuter rail and interurban systems.
If the Pittsburgh Carniege Busway were deemed to be a failure the taxpaers would not be stuck with a right of way that they cant use. The Busway mearly would turn into a all purpose road…Some HOV lanes have been discontinued and opened to traffic…Which begs the question of adding a 2 lane limited acces highway vs 2 tracks of light rail?
I’ve always thought that the automobile DID have a deep influence on all forms of public transportation. I also thought that all forms of public transportation declined after World War 2, and that the automobile ascended. Maybe in recent times we’ve seen public transit grow, but I thought we also saw automobile mileage grow, and I’m pretty sure it’s still the dominant mode, but was not dominant before WWII.
I’m not convinced that the difference between the streetcar use and the replacement bus use was just because of the bustitution. If the streetcar line had been experiencing steady or rising ridership, and management changed to buses for other reasons, and then ridership dropped, that would be one thing. Do you have figures to back that scenario? If however, as I suspect is the case, the line or system or city was experiencing declinining ridership which continued after bustitution, then I’d tend to conclude that it wasn’t the change to buses that caused the decline. I do grant I have no statisitics to support my suspicion.
One example: Cleveland Shaker Heights light rail lines underwent major rebuild and new vehicle procurement in the early 1980’s, yet still ridership dropped. However Cleveland’s population also dropped, and by a larger percentage than the light rail ridership. This would tend to deflate the argument that the light rail improvements were wasted, since all other things being equal the light rail percentage drop should have been close to the population drop, and one could argue that the improvements prevented greater ridership drop. Also they were investment should th
Fed Funds are being misused for BRT projects that really road improvement projects that give no real avatages to buses to go faster then the cars like a deadicated right of way
I thought the issue pertained to a heavy bus vs a light automobile. Shouldn’t the comparison then be you carrying 10 bundles up to the roof at the same vs having your wife or preteen child carrying them 1 at a time? Or the efficiency professor admonishing the class to be careful “I told my wife how to improve housework, now what she used to take 15 minutes to accomplish I now complete in only 10 minutes”
I agree that it is possible to spend on bus improvements, only to have those advantages trickle down to automobile improvements, something that’s harder to do with rail improvements. Something I’ve mentioned before, and I hope you’ll forgive me for beating a dead horse, it is possible to design bus rapid transit as an incremental improvement that could be converted to rail rapid transit.
This is similar to one of the arguments for light rail, that properly designed light rail can be upgraded to heavy rail, therefore build now on the cheap, whether bus or rail, and allow provision for future mode change.
Certainly we’ve seen the reverse, downgrading rail lines to bus. One or two exceptions, for example Pittsbughs east busway which uses 2 of the former 4 Pennsylvania Railroad-Conrail tracks, most others are instances having been where the rail disappeared in favor of regular bus on our nation’s highways.
"At the CTA, whose buses average a snail-like 9 m.p.h., bus rapid transit has been earmarked as the No. 1 near-term priority. Armed with a $153 million federal grant, the CTA plans to test bus-only lanes on four Chicago routes-portions of Chicago Avenue, Halsted Street, 79th Street and Jeffery Boulevard-starting mid-year 2009. The project would start with about 10 miles of bus-only lanes and eventually expand to more than 100 miles.
CTA buses will also be equipped with transponders so buses can breeze through intersections on green lights. And much like Cleveland, bus stops will be spaced farther apart-about a quarter-mile-to help cut travel times.
In the Chicago area, big-ticket rail projects-ranging from the CTA’s proposed Circle Line stretching around the city to Metra’s suburb-to-suburb STAR Line-would cost billions of dollars to build. Currently, no funding has been identified.
If Chicago’s upcoming experiment pays off, it’s possible that bus rapid transit networks, costing as little as one-fifth the price of heavy rail projects, would make a more viable alternative.
Chicago it might work because Chicago has wider streets and more room to play with…However 156,000,000 sounds like a lot of money when all you need is a line painting truck… Again Transit money being used as stealth highway money…However keeping traffic out of those lanes will require jersey barriers knowing that drivers will declare war on the bues for taking “there” lanes from them