BRT Vs. Light Rail — You Get What You Pay For
In the ridiculous ongoing battle of BRT vs. LRT (as if there is any comparison), I believe it would be useful if we came up with some helpful buzz phrases that state our position clearly.
To that end I want to resurrect something a BRT skeptic told me once:
You get what you pay for.
It’s a common phrase that everyone knows, and it’s a great way to knock bus rapid transit for what it is - a half-arsed non-solution to a real problem. BRT is an on-the-cheap way to kick the problem down the road a bit. It embodies short-term thinking, endangering the long-term viability of the region - whatever region it is being proposed for.
If someone suggests that BRT vs. LRT is VW vs. Lamborghini, we correct them and say it is Yugo vs. Toyota.
And we should rip any public officials who think that real public transit is too good for us - the unwashed masses. Proponents of BRT do not ride the bus - plain and simple. If they did, they’d push for LRT.
And we should find out how all these people get around. Do they ride the bus? If not, the authenticity of their support for BRT must be questioned. If they ride the train then we must ask them, “Don’t you think everyone deserves to ride the train?” And if they don’t take transit, then we have to stick it to them — “How can you possibly expect us to take you seriously when you don’t even take transit? Have you ever ridden a bus in your life?”
Some people who don’t ride mass transit want to adopt bus rapid transit at 10, 50, or 150% of the cost of light rail transit (depending on how much it costs to paint that turd), and in all cases it will deliver less than 5% of the service. Bus service is beneath human dignity, and BRT is a fraud. We should not tolerate it.
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December 14th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Peter: the cost difference isn’t expressed in terms of ‘%’ but in terms of ‘x’ — as in LRT is 10x more expensive on a per mile basis. Or to put another way: a city can get 10x as many BRT miles for what it would have spent on LRT. How much is Muni spending on the Central Subway money pit? How much did the 3rd street project cost? What else could they achieved with those billions of dollars? And as a bonus, these projects will have higher operating costs than the bus service they replace (so Muni gets to waste money twice).
In the East Bay, the proposed AC Transit BRT will run on 3 minute headways, with level-platform boarding, traffic signal prioritization and synchronization, and bike racks inside the bus. Passengers really could care less that the vehicles run on rubber tires if the line runs quickly and ontime.
December 14th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
bikerider - the ‘runs on rubber tires’ terminology is just hyperbole to take away from the extreme differences in rail vs. bus.
People like to ride the rail. People do not like to ride the bus. It’s that simple, and no amount of verbal gymnastics will change that. Passengers do, in fact, care very much what type of ride a type of mode offers, as the evidence bears out.
as for all those statistics you cite - they’re about as close to meaningless as once could get. per mile construction costs do matter, but lifetime costs are what we need to be concerned about - unless we want to kick the can down the road to our children and our grandchildren - like our parents and their parents did.
if anything motorized transport runs on 3-minute headways, it’s probably not suitable for grade-level urban transport - it need to be put underground. the reason BRT needs 3-minute headways, of course, is because that’s the only way to achieve a throughput that can be comparable to light rail. and in doing so, it destroys the environment with massive buses creating, in effect, an urban highway, right through the densest parts of our city.
BRT is a complete catastrophe. i’m edumacating people one by one - watch the groundswell happen. i say, don’t fight me - join me - be on the right side of history.
December 15th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Can we take your BRT hatred seriously? Have you ridden any of the BRT sytems that proponents point to - Bogota, Curitiba, Ottawa?
December 15th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
yes - you can take my BRT hatred seriously.
i have not ridden a full-on, real BRT system like those in Bogota and Cleveland, but neither have most proponents of BRT.
the difference between us, though, is that i _have_ ridden the bus, and I _have_ ridden rail, and when I need to travel long distances, i _am_ depended on public transit. Unlike BRT proponents, I have a long history of taking public transportation in cities around the world. At no time has bus travel ever been dignified. That’s why we have to oppose it.
December 15th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
I’ll take a fast clean bus with a seat over standing on a crowded slow rail vehicle anyday. Rails aren’t an end-all be-all.
December 16th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Peter: the problem with these bus vs. LRT comparisons is that the typical LRT project will get over $100m per mile investment, whereas the bus system (particularly in SF) is hopelessly underfunded. It isn’t even close to apples-apples comparison.
The AC Transit BRT shows what is possible when bus gets capital investment. Their BRT will cost $200 million for 20 miles (vs. Muni 3rd St. LRT $600m for 5 miles). Their BRT will have lower operating costs, allowing them to run on 3 minute headways. AC Transit will have sufficient space to allow bikes directly inside the buses at all hours, which is not possible with Muni’s cramped LRVs.
December 17th, 2008 at 12:32 am
It isn’t even close to apples-apples comparison.
i’m fine with making whatever comparisons you want to make. pick a couple of systems and let’s compare. fine by me.
as for per-mile capital costs to built LRT vs. BRT - that’s exactly the point of this post. some people are arguing that you can get something for nothing - that you can get rail for the price of bus, and that is called BRT, but i’m calling shenanigans on that - it’s just not true.
if you don’t like spending $100 million per mile on LRT, and you’d rather spend that money elsewhere, say, $10 million per mile on an equivalent BRT system and then the rest of it on regular bus transit, then that’s something i’d be willing to talk about - but that’s not what is being proposed here in the Bay Area or anywhere else. For us, it is either BRT or LRT - that’s it. We don’t get to take that $90/million per mile in construction costs savings and use it for other projects. If that were the case I might be the biggest BRT proponent in the Bay Area instead of its biggest opponent.
i’ve made the argument that buses are not fit to travel on - they don’t provide dignified transportation, and if someone has no choice bus to take it, then that ride should be free - that’s my position.
On AC Transit BRT or any BRT - again, you will get what you pay for. There’s never been a ‘free’ and there never will be. We’ll either accept that as a society or we won’t. If you truly feel that buses provide good, reliable, dignified, pleasurable, adequate, speedy transport - or whatever your conditions are - then that’s a case you’re free to make, just as I’m free to make the case that I think bus travel should not be tolerated. That BRT can be built for less initial up-front cost than LRT in some cases is not a surprise to me - it needs to be able to compete on _something_ - but I’m not going to pretend that a 20-mile BRT project should be built instead of 5-mile project, *if that is even the choice we have*, and nobody, to my knowledge, has suggested this is the case.
Further, even if that were the case, we would do well to think seriously about the choice. Issues like these crop up:
* Long-term operating expenses of LRT are less than BRT - as for all the studies I’ve seen - contrary to what you state.
* TOD is better with LRT - it pulls development close to the lines - proven.
* How much is dignified travel worth, even for working-class and poor people. Should they have to travel on buses? I say ‘no’.
Let’s talk about a real-world example - apples to apples. Take Geary Blvd - one of the highest trafficked transit corridors in the U.S. — should we build BRT or LRT? It’s up to us. We’re not going to build one of them half-way — it’s going to be all or nothing. The only question is, do we believe poor people should be forced to ride buses, or do they deserve the same modes of transportation that everybody else deserves?
As for 3-minute headways, I have no desire to run 3-minute headways in the middle of my city. I’m trying to get _rid_ of the highways, not build and/or accommodate new ones. This short-headway is a _requirement_ of any high-capacity BRT system - we simply have no other choice. This creates an urban highway. If we want that, let’s just expand Geary into a full-on highway from the ocean to downtown - it’ll be just as effective.
As far as Muni’s not allowing bikes - it’s obviously something we need to work on.
As for Muni’s cramped LRVs - again, more work.
Muni’s slowness - more work.
And none of these have anything to do with BRT vs. LRT on Geary, though. That is up to us.
Every major ‘green’ organization in the Bay Area has lent it’s implicit or explicit support to BRT, and there is absolutely no evidence that it works. Simply none. I mean, if we want to talk about transporting people, cities have done that for thousands of years without BRT, but now San Francisco and other Bay Area cities are supposed to mimic the transportation systems of Third World cities in the global south? Really? This doesn’t strike you as the slightest bit preposterous? I mean, some ideas are good, but it took me less than two weeks to figure out this whole BRT thing was a complete sham.
At some point in the future, we’re going to see a high-profile turnaround - and then the floodgates will open. I don’t know who’s going to be the first - I really don’t - but we will see it. Someone who’s been sitting on the sidelines for all this time is going to own up to their tacit support for BRT and say, “STOP. I was wrong.” And then the LRT will be back on the table, where it should have been in the first place.
I told some folks today that if I had _any_ evidence that BRT was not a complete fraud, I would be the first to admit it, and to make up for my incredible sins in bashing BRT, I would personally go out into the streets and promote BRT. And I would.
But I’m also fully confident I’ll never have to do that. We’ll see how it plays out. As I say often, let’s hope I’m spectacularly wrong about BRT. Or let’s hope the Cleveland BRT fails spectacularly soon so we don’t have to put up with BRT here.