9 ms·

Why I don't love Light Rail Transit

117 points by dweekly 7y ago

ricardobeat 7y ago
His whole argument relies on scarcity of light rail routes, as a path to gentrification. But here is what the network looks like in a city like Amsterdam: https://almeretours.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Amsterdam-Transportion-Map-2019.jpg https://almeretours.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Amsterdam...
- ramchip 7y ago
  He argues that’s only possible if you have enough density: > Second of all, unless your city is really dense or you have infinite money to spend, any public transit system that wants to actually provide coverage across the entire city is going to need a good bus network.
  - adjkant 7y ago
    Has any city ever argued against this? The thing is you need both, not just one.
- jboy55 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure his article is only about Sprawling North American cities built around big highways for cars.
  - the_watcher 7y ago
    Yea, he covered this with his line that "A lot of North American public transit advocacy can feel like a perpetual lament that North American cities aren’t laid out like European ones."
    - reissbaker 7y ago
      That seems like a pretty dismissive response: are European cities laid out like that as a response to light rail? If so, what's to say that North American cities won't also adapt to the presence of light rail? And it's not just European cities; Japan has an excellent subway system, and I've heard China's very new one is good as well. This feels like the learned-helplessness counterpart to American exceptionalism: what's so special about North America? Other cities adopted rail and adapted; the article doesn't address why North American cities couldn't as well. And in places with a good subway, buses are despised — they're slower, overstuffed (a single subway station can accommodate hundreds or thousands during commute hours; a single bus stop would have lines hours long at that rate), less comfortable... Buses can't move people in a dense area at the volume a subway can. (Also, why does this article only address Toronto? NYC is a pretty strong retort to the idea that subways can't work in North America.)
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        It's also easy to forget that the high density portions of most American cities were built around long since abandoned light rail or equivalents. San Francisco has turned a couple classic lines of street cars into a working museum, but it's easy to forget a much larger amount of San Francisco was served by them for several decades to the point where neighborhoods were shaped by them. It's even sometimes harder to further recall how many other American cities (almost all of them) had street car routes and passenger train routes lost to time other than as ghost remnants of neighborhood layouts (the odd street circle that used to be a street car turntable, the odd on street parking spaces where once was a street car passenger transit center, the odd railway trellis that used to be for passengers, etc). It's almost cultural amnesia at this point that so much of North America believes it has used nothing but the car for transport. It's not even that far removed in history (the "Greatest Generation" had a lot more transit options than today, which is not even 3 or 4 generations removed).
- timwaagh 7y ago
  Amsterdam is gentrified. I love the city but nobody who earns a below average income can really afford to live there. Most other Dutch cities rely on buses. Amsterdam still has them as well to cover some outlying areas. What he is saying is that buses should come before rail because they are cheap. That way, if you decide to lay down your first rail, it can operate to its full potential.
- maxsilver 7y ago
  Your argument re-enforces the author's point. Amsterdam has lots of light rail, and is almost entirely gentrified. It's one of the top-10 most expensive cities in all of Europe. The American version of this argument, is like saying "if rail was less scarce, there'd be less gentrification when it gets built. Just look at all the subway lines in New York City" -- without recognizing that NYC is one of the most hyper-gentrified expensive places in the entire nation.
  - adjkant 7y ago
    > without recognizing that NYC is one of the most hyper-gentrified expensive places in the entire nation The lines basically all existed before gentrification. As others have said, it seems like the argument here is that if you build transit that is too good, rich people will come, so keep to buses. In reality, if more cities had good rapid transit, gentrification wouldn't be focused on just a few cities in the US and instead high skilled workers would have more choices. Right now as someone who loves good public transit, my city options in the US are severely limited. Really it comes down to this IMO: If you build it, they will come. If you build it in one place, they will all come to one place. If you build it in many places, they will disperse. I do think the point on the positive feedback cycle is true, but it's not going away so to me that just says that from a market perspective there is a severe supply shortage of good public transit based cities, and the solution to that is not to forget about light rail. Building more transit everywhere is the only thing that will solve the problem.
kick 7y ago
Forgive me if there's something I am not getting about this article, but isn't his argument "Light rail is bad because it disadvantages rich homeowners," with a mild veil of pretending to care about the underclass?
- __rvnykk 7y ago
  I'm not a huge fan of his arguments but I'd say he's saying more of the opposite, ie. "Light rail only advantages rich homeowners"
  - ramshorns 7y ago
    "Light rail advantages the owners of nearby land, driving out the low-income tenants, and doesn't serve as many people as a similar-cost bus system"
- dweekly 7y ago
  I think his point is that it is terrific for those rich enough to live near an LRT station and results in big appreciation of real estate (poor people disproportionately rent can own so property value increases benefit the rich but not the poor). Buses do very little for property values but help everyone's commute.
aaronbrethorst 7y ago
This blog post doesn't use the words "zoning" or "affordable housing" once. And on a related note is this article from ProPublica: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-some-of-americas-richest-towns-fight-affordable-housing https://www.propublica.org/article/how-some-of-americas-rich...
jb_s 7y ago
Sydney is in the middle of a multi-year project to install LR, at staggering expense. It's still not clear to me what this achieves, as opposed to creating a dedicated bus lane where the tram line is going and paying for a few hundred extra high-frequency buses.
- aaronbrethorst 7y ago
  The linked article below is about Seattle, not Sydney, but I expect that the cost breakdown is similar. Breakdown: 87% spent on new right-of-way plus 13% spent on light rail. https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/10/12/brt-is-not-cheaper-than-light-rail/ https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/10/12/brt-is-not-cheaper-th...
  - __rvnykk 7y ago
    Ottawa just finished the first Bus Rapid Transit to LRT conversion in the world[1]. It's only been a week or so, but it seems to be going quite well. I hope we can get some solid data in a few years 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXGOscjTRsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXGOscjTRsc
- LIV2 7y ago
  Not to mention how many businesses along George st it has killed, all the noise etc Everything the government does in NSW screams "lining the pockets of big business"
nerdponx 7y ago
There's a lot of interesting content here, but I found the example of Toronto a bit odd. Everyone I know who lives in Toronto ends up commuting by streetcar, at least in part, and they all decry it as overcrowded and slow. However that's just anecdotal. Maybe the typical Toronto commuter (who doesn't live on the waterfront) thinks it's fine.
trynewideas 7y ago
I don't grok the framing of this. Why does this piece feel like it's proposing LRT and buses as binary, exclusive choices, instead of components of one system that each have different strengths and weaknesses? Namely, this point: > This is money that could be far better spent, on a per-rider basis, on operating good bus routes; but instead is going to be spent on beautiful, brand new lines that only serve a relatively small catchment area unless they’re already integrated into a dense transit network (which is rarely the case). Specifically: > unless they’re already integrated into a dense transit network (which is rarely the case). What is the case, and why is it rare? In other words, this seems to make the case that because planners are incompetent, they should fund bus route saturation instead of train lines inherently less capable of saturation. But instead, it just leaves me asking why integration of LRT and bus lines (and ability, last-mile, cargo, and scenic/tourism transit options) isn't better, since that seems like the best goal.
- URSpider94 7y ago
  Not the author, but I’d say because public transit budgets are generally fixed amounts of money, so if you spend millions on a light rail line, you don’t have that money to spend on buses. I agree that a light rail network with feeder bus lines can work well. Boston’s “T” had done this in Cambridge - there’s an underground bus depot at the Harvard Square subway stop, where buses from all over the north side of the river converge so people can move to the train for the trip into downtown Boston.
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    I would note that the "T" isn't a light rail system or at least isn't mostly a light rail system. The "T" is a full subway system with a few light rail additions (parts of the green line).
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  He makes an argument that light rail is both less efficient and serves a limited population. I think it's good argument and a fairly well-known argument - light rail has been a poor use of transit dollars for a long time, it's only benefit is bragging rights since it can never be faster than ordinary traffic and it inherently costs more than buses. Medium rail and other system capable of faster movement than traffic is a different thing (but that's been neglected since it costs more to start and it doesn't give the cities more obvious bragging right). The only "benefit" of light rail is it makes it harder to abandon when the going gets tough. The flexibility of buses should be advantage but this flexibility means they're easy to gut in a circumstance of budget deficits. All you are saying "why not have both" but if one is strictly worse than the other, there's no reason to have both, you can do better with one.
barrkel 7y ago
Infrastructure increases land value and benefits people who can afford to live close. Not very surprising. I'm not sure buses would be more egalitarian though. Buses are great for people who are time rich and income poor; buses have far less predictable schedules and are subject to most of the chaos of traffic conditions, even when there are dedicated bus lanes. It still doesn't make a whole lot of sense for wealthy people to ride buses, and I don't think a great bus network would fundamentally alter the inequality dynamics. At least light rail smears out the "well off" zone a bit more.
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
> “As I’ve talked about before, this spatial arrangement had a useful side effect: commuting distance was a part of the cost you had to pay to live the good life. But now, we’re going through this big inversion where downtown is cool again, and we’re losing the self-corrective mechanism we used to have.“ This seems fundamentally wrong to me in a way I find hard to square with someone as familiar with the subject matter as this author. Many theories of valuation of real estate start with basic assumptions about people bidding with offers to pay (to buy / rent living space, buy groceries, etc.) according to their beliefs on how well they can use that land / space. If everyone is rational (clearly not, but not very important here) it means the person who can extract the most value from the land and has enough capital to outbid competitors will get the chance to use the land. This has been true in dense downtown areas where workers compete by working more hours for a long time, such as in downtown Manhattan where bankers and high powered attorneys would live even during the supposed suburban period the author refers to. To these workers, the time cost of commuting was not worth the extra space or “the good life” as the author calls it (which paints a very confusingly biased presentation). Instead, the marginal value of proximity to work more was valued higher. Now, hardly due to “downtown being cool again,” white collar work is swinging in a direction where it’s not just bankers and attorneys who see the deal of reduced commute time in order to work more as a good thing, rather it’s tech workers, marketers, knowledge workers of all types. Everyone feels pressured to work more and be seen visibly working more, for status signalling. Employers are less loyal to workers than ever, so you need to live close to many other possible employers, to switch to ass-in-chair long hours signalling at the new place once the current place lays you off. You have to pay $3000/month rent, huge grocery bills, receive poor retirement benefits all predicated on blind faith in equity markets, to be in this frantic hedonic treadmill cycle just to barely keep a job and have even the tiniest chances at social mobility. It seems quite obvious that service workers, low status jobs like teaching, blue collar work would immediately get pressed hard to push out and eat the costs of longer commutes. Their “good life” is having structured hours (don’t get me wrong, they are woefully underpaid and have poor negotiation power) instead of being compelled to do constant social signalling of more and more hours. This all just seems like a consequence of labor collapsing in on itself in a slapdash scramble to grab enough money to possibly retire comfortably while capital just keeps taking increasingly larger shares of generated wealth.
GhostVII 7y ago
The nice thing about light rail is that it can actually make public transit more convenient than driving in dense areas, if the tracks are separate from the road. On a bus you are stuck in the same traffic as everyone else, so you might as well just be driving your own car instead. Light rail discourages driving, decreasing congestion, while busses add to it.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Well, you can make a bus-only lane, if the street is wide enough.
- ramshorns 7y ago
  That's more a function of the street design than the transit technology. Streetcars in mixed traffic are about as slow as buses, and buses in dedicated lanes are about as fast as light rail.
jeremyvisser 7y ago
This is a lengthy article, yet the author fails to address any of the concerns he claims to be countering. He claims only the rich use light rail. But what is it about a light rail that causes a poor person to look at it and walk away deciding it's not for them? It simply doesn't make sense. Build LRT to a poor area, people will use it. He then shows an infographic of a hypothetical city covered in bus routes, alongside the same city covered by one LRT route through a gentrified area. This is unfair. How about comparing equivalent LRT routes with bus routes? Money sunk into buses is money no longer spendable on LRT. There's an infographic that shows bus route ridership compared to LRT route ridership but we learn only the what, not the why. Also, the article makes no mention whatsoever of Melbourne, an example of LRT working very well for over a century. I'm disappointed to say that I learned exactly nothing reading the article.
- taneq 7y ago
  > Build LRT to a poor area, people will use it. I thought one of the major issues with light rail was how much it costs vs. just using buses? If a last-mile transport option is nice but very expensive then it'll only be installed in richer neighbourhoods and therefore largely be used by richer people.
  - mehhh 7y ago
    Sub-area equity and ridership analysis are used to counter this, hence Seattle building its light rail network through one of the poorest & highest transit ridership parts of town, and continuing it north through U-District (where cheap studios can still be had) up to Northgate and eventually Everett. Would be gentrifiers are in for a rude awakening: http://theneedling.com/2019/08/12/thousands-of-engineers-flee-rainier-beach-suffering-from-premature-gentrification/ http://theneedling.com/2019/08/12/thousands-of-engineers-fle...
- cjf4 7y ago
  >But what is it about a light rail that causes a poor person to look at it and walk away deciding it's not for them? It simply doesn't make sense. Build LRT to a poor area, people will use it. It's generalization based on access. In order to be viable, LRT almost always runs through affluent areas where influential people live, and the areas that aren't affluent near the path are likely to gentrify. It's not that people from lower income neighborhoods won't ever use LRT, it's that they are less likely to based on their communities' geography.
deft 7y ago
"this is what rich people think poor people want" - rich person
kazoo_energy 7y ago
In cities with high traffic, rapid transit buses cannot compete with light rail that has right of way. LRT can move more people faster, and it can also move strollers, bicycles, and wheelchairs.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  San Francisco has a lot of bus and taxi-only lanes downtown so that buses have more reliable schedule and faster transit times.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Buses can take strollers, and even bikes; the important thing is to allow people to board through the middle and back, directly to the open areas left for those items, rather than forcing them through the front. And then have ticket validators throughout the bus, so they don't have to leave the stroller.
  - __rvnykk 7y ago
    Maybe it depends on the area but bikes definitely aren't welcome in my area. There are bike racks, but I mentioned in another comment they're not a good alternative. And certainly no room / not welcome in the buses themselves
    - icebraining 7y ago
      Well, here we have (some) bus lines where you can just enter with your bike: https://euroveloportugal.com/files/2016/02/servico_bike_bus_carris.jpg https://euroveloportugal.com/files/2016/02/servico_bike_bus_...
bryanlarsen 7y ago
From what I can tell, Toronto is a good argument for subways and light rail. Many bus routes exist mainly to feed rail, without rail the buses wouldn't have the ridership they do have.
qwerty456127 7y ago
> In the 60s and 70s, remember, cities were seen as undesirable. The goal was to live in the suburbs; farther away was more desirable than closer in. This still is awesome if you have a remote job. E.g. I hate big cities almost as much as I hate to drive. All we need is to stop concentrating business (e.g. by increasing commercial property and corporation taxes significantly wherever big business concentration is too high) and to develop public transport, whatever a technology. Even when this does not seem financially viable in the short term.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Businesses already pay a rent premium when they concentrate. Maybe we should change the reasons that lead them to do that instead of just punishing them for it.
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    What's the reason? How is it so significant they choose to pay? Or could they pay more perhaps? If they could might the money be used to subsidize public transport and remote businesses development? Also how does it happen the New York subway is such a disaster while there is so much big business money in New York?
    - icebraining 7y ago
      > What's the reason? How is it so significant they choose to pay? I don't know! I'm saying we should find out before advocating policy changes. > Or could they pay more perhaps? If they could might the money be used to subsidize public transport and remote businesses development? Funding public transport is nice, but it doesn't actually solve the issue you were complaining about. As for subsiding remote business development, what do you have in mind? It seems to be quite funded already. Would dumping some extra money really change anything? > Also how does it happen the New York subway is such a disaster while there is so much big business money in New York? Another good question that should be answered before policy changes can be formulated.
__rvnykk 7y ago
The argument in the article seems to be mainly focused on gentrification, which is a huge can of worms, but I disagree with the implied notion that increasing the value of any land is inherently without merit (I say this as someone in the lower-middle class). Ottawa's LRT just got started a few days ago, and I for one am super happy about it. As a cyclist, the train offers a huge amount of freedom (even though I don't live too close to a station). The buses here do accommodate bicycles, in theory, but in practice making your bus driver and a hundred passengers wait multiple minutes to hook your bike to the front isn't very appealing. With the train I can just walk on. Ultimately, I think this argument is against a single point, but there are many points to be made in favour that were left uncovered.
welliman 7y ago
I’m not buying this. I ride the light rail in Minneapolis a fair amount and others on it don’t look or act rich at all. In fact the express bus I frequently take seems to be full of more affluent people than the light rail.
Steltek 7y ago
The real trick is buried: dedicated bus lanes. You can't get reliable, frequent service without bus only lanes that are camera enforced. LRT is popular because it usually gets a dedicated RoW which makes service look amazing next to a bus stuck in traffic.
shkkmo 7y ago
TLDR; Don't reduce bus funding to pay for light rail.
appleflaxen 7y ago
> The Koch brothers, of all people, funded an anti-LRT campaign in Phoenix Why is it surprising that a massive private petrochemical conglomerate would be against mass transit?
- adjkant 7y ago
  Let's also not forget they are avidly against buses too. Not sure what bringing their name up in this piece does for the point of the article. If anything it makes me cast doubt in the points if the ad campaigns they have run (shown to be quite ridiculous by Hassan Minaj and others) influenced them without more of a critical eye to the arguments.
opportune 7y ago
Perhaps rich people only take LRT because it's actually good enough to not drive over taking the bus? If I take the bus I know it's going to take significantly longer than if I just drove instead, especially if I have to transfer. I would be fully in favor of making the bus network where I live better, but as a daily caltrain rider, I can't imagine actually replacing the caltrain route with a bus route. I don't understand how you can dislike LRT and then point out the benefits of Toronto's system of using LRT for heavy transit and bus for last mile. The bus is not good for long transits, and people want to use public transportation for long transits... we need trains for that. In fact, reducing long transits are what you want to go after. They spend more time on the road otherwise and thus contribute a disproportionate amount of traffic. Plus since they are faster than driving (usually) they also actually get drivers off the road
icegreentea2 7y ago
I think this article conflates two different concepts. One is the physical mode (bus vs light rain vs heavier track/subway), and the other the purpose (rapid transit vs not). You can use buses to implement some form of rapid transit (the article's references to Brampton and Mississauga for example are both implementing Bus Rapid Transit systems). In these systems, you have buses running effectively the same role as LRT, except on a dedicated road surface instead of rails. BRTs are great, but cannot scale up as much as LRTs. There may be a reasonable argument that some of the cities with lower performing LRTs maybe should have implemented BRTs as a better investment. However, I think that BRTs more or less cause all the same issues that the author is worried about LRTs about. Fundamentally, this is about the relative investment that a city should make into building concentrated high capacity lines vs spreading low capacity coverage over area. Light Rail vs Buses is a red herring.
ramshorns 7y ago
>Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to set up a bus route that works well. You need buses, drivers, and some paint to make dedicated lanes and transit priority intersections. It's actually even easier than that, in a sense. Most Toronto bus routes have no dedicated lanes and little or no transit signal priority, and they still manage to carry lots of people. The schedules aren't as reliable as they would be with some more priority, but they're frequent enough (10 minutes or better) that it doesn't matter.
markus92 7y ago
Interesting point the article makes: better have more decent bus lines than fewer, elatively less useful lightrail lines. When looking at European cities, which are less car-centric, lightrail is usually built when it makes economic sense: most forms of LRT have higher fixed costs, but lower marginal operating costs per passenger as soon as a certain level of ridership is reached, as well as a higher maximum capacity. Though there is some level of cause/effect - rail is more popular with passengers as it's more comfortable usually - this doesn't outweigh the economic argument. With the numbers across the Atlantic, might as well just run busses. Once ridership is high enough, upgrading to LRT is always a solution. By the time that happens, it'll most likely pay for itself.
rossdavidh 7y ago
Misses one of the advantages of buses over light rail: flexibility to change. My hometown of Austin, TX is no role model for urban transit, but we have added bus-only lanes downtown in recent years, and also moved bus lines around a bit to use the existing number of buses and drivers more efficiently. A lot of this was based on feedback from users and also in response to the way the city changed over time. Light rail, intrinsically, is more expensive to modify, and harder to get buy-in to modify. This means that, if your city population is changing at all fast, you will inevitably end up with a rail system that is at best, built for the city you once were. Buses, because they use the same network as the cars, are inherently better suited for adapting quickly (uh, I mean "less slowly") to the way the city changes.
- flukus 7y ago
  Flexibility is a huge downside to anyone that depends on public transport. When you move in somewhere or buy a property access to public transport this is a big consideration and you don't want it to disappear one day.
asveikau 7y ago
The first point I really took issue with was this: > farther away was more desirable than closer in Before the current urban renaissance, this was absolutely not true. Inner suburbs were often nicer, especially if adjacent to a "nice" part of a city. People still lived very far from the urban core, commuting to the city, and that was cheaper and less desirable than an inner suburb.
SECProto 7y ago
This article mostly boils down to "Toronto has a lot of popular bus routes, other cities should just make bus routes work better instead of building LRT." This misses the key difference, even though it is pointed out elsewhere in the article. Toronto first built two long subway routes with simple layouts. Suburban residents demanded better transit, so a number of fast, frequent (and therefore convenient) bus routes feeding the subway were created. Fifty years later, ridership on bus routes and subway routes is very high. Cities that are building LRTs generally have fairly efficient bus systems already. Take Ottawa for a local example - they have had BRT to the suburbs for decades. Fast, separated lanes, etc. They are building an LRT in sort of a mirror of the Toronto system - two central lines, one E-W one N-S, and bus routes will feed into it. The train is fast, frequent, reliable - so transfering will not cause issues. This is being done to replace, essentially, fleets of buses leaving downtown every couple minutes, following the exact same routes for 10+ km before diverging. Replacing that initial section with a higher density mode, and changing the buses into suburban feeders, makes perfect sense. Aside: I think the title is clickbait, and I think it makes a lot of statements without any citations (eg, "Montreal is much more European in layout and mindset" [so we should ignore it in our analysis]. Or "The area around the LRT lines definitely attract investment, but if you look at who actually uses the line a few years in, it’s mostly rich people.") Other comment: While it points out Toronto's real bus route successes (high ridership numbers), it ignores the real issues they have had with building more subway/LRT lines over the last 30+ years. They have approved and cancelled some kind of Downtown Relief Line numerous times. Overfull buses is an actual issue in TO. note: It took me a while to read the article and write this comment, so I'm sure some/all has been duplicated in other comments
- __rvnykk 7y ago
  Phase 1 opened on the 14th, it's very nice so far
  - SECProto 7y ago
    Yup! It is definitely good, a little hard to assess until they stop the concurrent service in a couple weeks. I also think Phase 2 will make it work much better - ending at Blair means there is still a lot of route duplication in the east end (and I assume west is similar)
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
As someone who has lived in the greater Toronto area for years, I've seen its public transit system go from good to absolutely awful in a twenty year period. The system he lauds as excellent has not scaled, especially in the downtown, dense, core, where the streetcars and subways are jammed full and delayed constantly.
quickthrower2 7y ago
I am in favour of buses, bus lanes and roads because they are flexible. Buses can be reasonably fast, and routes can be adjusted as time goes on to adjust for population changes, such as new apartment blocks. They also can be electric. You still need trains though as a way to get a lot of people in from more populated suburbs. Light rail I find a bit useless in many circumstances because it is so slow and stops so frequently. I guess that might vary per implementation. It's good if you happen to live within 5 minutes of the station and don't want to go further than 5 minutes walk at the other end. I use car/bus/train/uber. Sometimes ferry. But never light rail!
wwweston 7y ago
Some good observations here, maybe especially the point that without a good bus network light rail can become luxury transport. But speaking as someone who sometimes uses rail in Los Angeles of all places (and in fact has used public transport almost exclusively for the last month), a couple of counterpoints seem worthwhile: * In a sprawl-y traffic dense city like Los Angeles -- or even in a less dense area like Utah's Wasatch Front where traffic density in a few corridors heavily outweighs capacity at peak travel times -- rail as a backbone isn't just a nicer bus, it's a more efficient bus, and probably more efficient than a bus can be short of something like LA's Metro Silver Line which utilizes the 110 to provide express service. If you want an efficient system, rail backbones might not be the only tool in your box, but they should be one of them. * The light rail systems I'm most familiar with (LA Metro and Utah TRAX & Frontrunner) definitely get used, and especially heavily used at commute times. The last few weeks when I've used the Metro I've seen the Expo and Gold line cars packed to the point of no more standing room during rush hour, and people have to wait for the next car. That's past capacity usage in a city most people don't naturally associate with public transportation. * Additionally, while I can't claim any unusual ability to discern socioeconomic status on sight, informal observations about the level of diversity I've seen on my rides suggests it's not majority middle/upper class riders. And on the LA lines that have seen falling usage (Green and Blue), the research IIRC seems to say the riders who went elsewhere got cars, suggesting they were low-income and rode for economic reasons beforehand. * The unstudied rail supporter insistent of its virtues and indifferent to other forms of public transport is NOT one that I frequently encounter. I may be wrong, my observation sample may be biased in several ways, but I would expect that if you polled a sample of rail supporters on the question of whether high-quality bus service is equally important, a majority of them would say yes. If you picked self-identifying new urbanists (presumably the people the author spends some of his own credibility on caricaturing as scare-quoted “forward-thinking” brunch people) I expect that percentage would be even higher and you'd find them more than ready to share their own ideas on last-mile problems and cost-per-passenger-mile of rail-vs-bus plus bonus topics like whether/how ride-hailing apps, electric scooters, and bicycles should fit into all this.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
This made me look up Caltrain Daily ridership[1] which is about 65K/day. Now Caltrain is not considered "light rail" because it uses regular rails and locomotives with their accompanying "full size" train cars. Versus the lighter framed "light rail" cars that VTA uses for its service. It is interesting that while CalTrain is over crowded at commute times and struggles with having enough capacity, the light rail system is underutilized. Citylab covered some of the issues of the light rail system but I would really like a transportation expert's evaluation of Bart/Caltrain/Muni/Lightrail/Bus service in the greater Bay Area. There seems to be a huge opportunity here even though I get that there are big systemic forces that resist making those changes. [1] http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/_Marketing/pdf/2018+Annual+Passenger+Counts.pdf?v=2 http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/_Marketing/pdf/2018+Annual+Pa...
- pcwalton 7y ago
  > It is interesting that while CalTrain is over crowded at commute times and struggles with having enough capacity, the light rail system is underutilized. True in San Jose—VTA is one of the least functional public transit systems in the entire country—but not in San Francisco. The state considers Muni Metro to be overcrowded, in fact: https://mtc.ca.gov/sites/default/files/CCTS_FebWorkshop_BreakoutHandout_ShortMed_SFMetro_FINAL.pdf https://mtc.ca.gov/sites/default/files/CCTS_FebWorkshop_Brea...
bryanlarsen 7y ago
Starting with a definition is probably useful. To many "LRT" means the type of rail system that doesn't have a fully dedicated right of way, it has crossings rather than over/under passes. I agree that those are quite silly; a lot of expense for little benefit over buses. To others, an LRT is fully or almost fully dedicated. It often doesn't provide much benefit over a fully dedicated BRT, but its cost isn't substantially different from a BRT either -- it's the right of way, the stations and those over/under passes that cost the large bulk of the money. A good BRT will cost billions so you might as well spend a little bit more to get the cachet and the capacity of a rail system.
rootusrootus 7y ago
He makes a good point. Where I live (Portland, Oregon) we have dumped most of our transit money into LRT. As a result, even though I live within the urban limits, if I want to take public transit downtown it's a little over 2 hours by bus -- there's a stop .22 miles away, but the schedule is once an hour on weekdays, not at all on weekends. Google actually suggests it would be faster if I walked 46 minutes to another bus line that would then get me to the LRT, and it would only take about 1.75 hours total. Or, I can just drive 20 minutes into the office. I'd love to be able to take public transit but I'm not giving up an extra couple hours of my day to use it.
- sandworm101 7y ago
  Same here. Bus doesnt start until 6am. So it never works for me. Biuld all the rails you want, spend billions on tunnels, if i cannot get to/from work on time it all means nothing.
carapace 7y ago
TL;DR: > Anyway I’m going through all of this to say two things. First, you can move a lot of people by bus if you need to; the TTC is a good demonstration that large numbers of people will take bus routes for their regular commute if the network is well-run and gets them to where they need to go. Second of all, unless your city is really dense or you have infinite money to spend, any public transit system that wants to actually provide coverage across the entire city is going to need a good bus network. > Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to set up a bus route that works well. You need buses, drivers, and some paint to make dedicated lanes and transit priority intersections. The cost just isn’t on the same magnitude as expropriating land, ripping it up, putting in rails, and then running trains all day. > If an LRT line is carrying a daily load of passengers that could be handled by a bus route (as nearly all of them could be, and are, here in Toronto) then its purpose for existing isn’t “higher order transit”, it’s “luxury public transit”.
smileysteve 7y ago
He's not wrong about busses having many advantages, particularly in time to live and direct costs, but 2 things. 1. Without dedicated right of way, the wealthy won't ride OR fund (because they don't understand who would ride over drive) busses 2. The flexibility of buses is also their downfall. These areas won't get gentrified by businesses because if crowds do come, they may be temporary.
mehrdadn 7y ago
I didn't know some of these terms had slightly different (but overlapping) meanings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_rail_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_rail_terminology
arunpuri 7y ago
This is Rail Transport Map from 2 cities I have experienced Singapore (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Singapore_MRT_and_LRT_System_Map.svg/900px-Singapore_MRT_and_LRT_System_Map.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Si...) Delhi (https://lunchtigestbi.cf/photo/bab1f2ab4a3df96bd85c5eae309218c0.jpg https://lunchtigestbi.cf/photo/bab1f2ab4a3df96bd85c5eae30921...) Both of them work due to different reasons. Singapore, it goes hand-in-hand with urban planning (and buses and other transport initiatives) and Delhi as Roads infra was cracking and with people living in city and working in sub-urbs taking train makes more sense than spend 2-3 hours in commute.
rjsw 7y ago
I live in a city with light rail [1], it goes to several of the poorer areas. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Metrolink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Metrolink
nayuki 7y ago
Other long articles where Toronto is praised for its bus and streetcar network, and how they feed passengers into the subway system: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/08/how-america-killed-transit/568825/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/08/how-america-k... https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/10/while-america-suffocated-transit-other-countries-embraced-it/572167/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/10/while-america...
xvilka 7y ago
A lot of the cities build subway or tram stations in underdeveloped areas as a precursor of future expansion. And it works - after subway stop starts to work more developers start to build high-rises, shops, people start to move there from other underdeveloped areas without prospects of having a subway station. I see this article as an excuse against proper city and public transportation planning. It works everywhere but US, so maybe it's time to stop arguing and follow the example of other countries?
gok 7y ago
When the author says LRT they seem to be explicitly referring to streetcars. Which are, yeah, generally pretty stupid. Build real rapid transit or run buses. If you want to get rich people to ride the buses, add express routes that bypass poor neighborhoods.
crushingcrash 7y ago
Montreal’s subway is phenomenal.
nphd 7y ago
Extra-long or double-decker buses have crush load capacities around 120 pax. A single Bart trainset can have a crush load capacity of about 2000 pax and can depart every 2 minutes. So you would need a double decker bus departing roughly every 7.2 seconds to match that peak throughput. It just doesn't scale.
ykevinator 7y ago
This is the left talking to the left. To get better coverage, use fewer words (because the right is dumb but equal).
emmelaich 7y ago
Pros with rail * smooth * quiet Cons * fixed infrastructure - one breakdown or labour strike will bring the whole thing to grinding halt. You can't just simply move a lot of carriages to other places easily in response to demand * expensive We'd be much better off with better (bigger, electric/hybrid) buses.
purplezooey 7y ago
I share some of the concerns but in many cases it's just the best you can do. Unfortunately we can't use eminent domain as much now to get better right of ways. Always some angry person or interest in the way.

117 points by dweekly 7y ago

His whole argument relies on scarcity of light rail routes, as a path to gentrification. But here is what the network looks like in a city like Amsterdam: https://almeretours.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Amsterdam-Transportion-Map-2019.jpg https://almeretours.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Amsterdam...

ramchip 7y ago
He argues that’s only possible if you have enough density: > Second of all, unless your city is really dense or you have infinite money to spend, any public transit system that wants to actually provide coverage across the entire city is going to need a good bus network.
- adjkant 7y ago
  Has any city ever argued against this? The thing is you need both, not just one.
jboy55 7y ago
I'm pretty sure his article is only about Sprawling North American cities built around big highways for cars.
- the_watcher 7y ago
  Yea, he covered this with his line that "A lot of North American public transit advocacy can feel like a perpetual lament that North American cities aren’t laid out like European ones."
  - reissbaker 7y ago
    That seems like a pretty dismissive response: are European cities laid out like that as a response to light rail? If so, what's to say that North American cities won't also adapt to the presence of light rail? And it's not just European cities; Japan has an excellent subway system, and I've heard China's very new one is good as well. This feels like the learned-helplessness counterpart to American exceptionalism: what's so special about North America? Other cities adopted rail and adapted; the article doesn't address why North American cities couldn't as well. And in places with a good subway, buses are despised — they're slower, overstuffed (a single subway station can accommodate hundreds or thousands during commute hours; a single bus stop would have lines hours long at that rate), less comfortable... Buses can't move people in a dense area at the volume a subway can. (Also, why does this article only address Toronto? NYC is a pretty strong retort to the idea that subways can't work in North America.)
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      It's also easy to forget that the high density portions of most American cities were built around long since abandoned light rail or equivalents. San Francisco has turned a couple classic lines of street cars into a working museum, but it's easy to forget a much larger amount of San Francisco was served by them for several decades to the point where neighborhoods were shaped by them. It's even sometimes harder to further recall how many other American cities (almost all of them) had street car routes and passenger train routes lost to time other than as ghost remnants of neighborhood layouts (the odd street circle that used to be a street car turntable, the odd on street parking spaces where once was a street car passenger transit center, the odd railway trellis that used to be for passengers, etc). It's almost cultural amnesia at this point that so much of North America believes it has used nothing but the car for transport. It's not even that far removed in history (the "Greatest Generation" had a lot more transit options than today, which is not even 3 or 4 generations removed).
timwaagh 7y ago
Amsterdam is gentrified. I love the city but nobody who earns a below average income can really afford to live there. Most other Dutch cities rely on buses. Amsterdam still has them as well to cover some outlying areas. What he is saying is that buses should come before rail because they are cheap. That way, if you decide to lay down your first rail, it can operate to its full potential.
maxsilver 7y ago
Your argument re-enforces the author's point. Amsterdam has lots of light rail, and is almost entirely gentrified. It's one of the top-10 most expensive cities in all of Europe. The American version of this argument, is like saying "if rail was less scarce, there'd be less gentrification when it gets built. Just look at all the subway lines in New York City" -- without recognizing that NYC is one of the most hyper-gentrified expensive places in the entire nation.
- adjkant 7y ago
  > without recognizing that NYC is one of the most hyper-gentrified expensive places in the entire nation The lines basically all existed before gentrification. As others have said, it seems like the argument here is that if you build transit that is too good, rich people will come, so keep to buses. In reality, if more cities had good rapid transit, gentrification wouldn't be focused on just a few cities in the US and instead high skilled workers would have more choices. Right now as someone who loves good public transit, my city options in the US are severely limited. Really it comes down to this IMO: If you build it, they will come. If you build it in one place, they will all come to one place. If you build it in many places, they will disperse. I do think the point on the positive feedback cycle is true, but it's not going away so to me that just says that from a market perspective there is a severe supply shortage of good public transit based cities, and the solution to that is not to forget about light rail. Building more transit everywhere is the only thing that will solve the problem.

kick 7y ago

Forgive me if there's something I am not getting about this article, but isn't his argument "Light rail is bad because it disadvantages rich homeowners," with a mild veil of pretending to care about the underclass?

__rvnykk 7y ago
I'm not a huge fan of his arguments but I'd say he's saying more of the opposite, ie. "Light rail only advantages rich homeowners"
- ramshorns 7y ago
  "Light rail advantages the owners of nearby land, driving out the low-income tenants, and doesn't serve as many people as a similar-cost bus system"
dweekly 7y ago
I think his point is that it is terrific for those rich enough to live near an LRT station and results in big appreciation of real estate (poor people disproportionately rent can own so property value increases benefit the rich but not the poor). Buses do very little for property values but help everyone's commute.

aaronbrethorst 7y ago

This blog post doesn't use the words "zoning" or "affordable housing" once. And on a related note is this article from ProPublica: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-some-of-americas-richest-towns-fight-affordable-housing https://www.propublica.org/article/how-some-of-americas-rich...

jb_s 7y ago

Sydney is in the middle of a multi-year project to install LR, at staggering expense. It's still not clear to me what this achieves, as opposed to creating a dedicated bus lane where the tram line is going and paying for a few hundred extra high-frequency buses.

aaronbrethorst 7y ago
The linked article below is about Seattle, not Sydney, but I expect that the cost breakdown is similar. Breakdown: 87% spent on new right-of-way plus 13% spent on light rail. https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/10/12/brt-is-not-cheaper-than-light-rail/ https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/10/12/brt-is-not-cheaper-th...
- __rvnykk 7y ago
  Ottawa just finished the first Bus Rapid Transit to LRT conversion in the world[1]. It's only been a week or so, but it seems to be going quite well. I hope we can get some solid data in a few years 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXGOscjTRsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXGOscjTRsc
LIV2 7y ago
Not to mention how many businesses along George st it has killed, all the noise etc Everything the government does in NSW screams "lining the pockets of big business"

nerdponx 7y ago

There's a lot of interesting content here, but I found the example of Toronto a bit odd. Everyone I know who lives in Toronto ends up commuting by streetcar, at least in part, and they all decry it as overcrowded and slow. However that's just anecdotal. Maybe the typical Toronto commuter (who doesn't live on the waterfront) thinks it's fine.

trynewideas 7y ago

I don't grok the framing of this. Why does this piece feel like it's proposing LRT and buses as binary, exclusive choices, instead of components of one system that each have different strengths and weaknesses? Namely, this point: > This is money that could be far better spent, on a per-rider basis, on operating good bus routes; but instead is going to be spent on beautiful, brand new lines that only serve a relatively small catchment area unless they’re already integrated into a dense transit network (which is rarely the case). Specifically: > unless they’re already integrated into a dense transit network (which is rarely the case). What is the case, and why is it rare? In other words, this seems to make the case that because planners are incompetent, they should fund bus route saturation instead of train lines inherently less capable of saturation. But instead, it just leaves me asking why integration of LRT and bus lines (and ability, last-mile, cargo, and scenic/tourism transit options) isn't better, since that seems like the best goal.

URSpider94 7y ago
Not the author, but I’d say because public transit budgets are generally fixed amounts of money, so if you spend millions on a light rail line, you don’t have that money to spend on buses. I agree that a light rail network with feeder bus lines can work well. Boston’s “T” had done this in Cambridge - there’s an underground bus depot at the Harvard Square subway stop, where buses from all over the north side of the river converge so people can move to the train for the trip into downtown Boston.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  I would note that the "T" isn't a light rail system or at least isn't mostly a light rail system. The "T" is a full subway system with a few light rail additions (parts of the green line).
joe_the_user 7y ago
He makes an argument that light rail is both less efficient and serves a limited population. I think it's good argument and a fairly well-known argument - light rail has been a poor use of transit dollars for a long time, it's only benefit is bragging rights since it can never be faster than ordinary traffic and it inherently costs more than buses. Medium rail and other system capable of faster movement than traffic is a different thing (but that's been neglected since it costs more to start and it doesn't give the cities more obvious bragging right). The only "benefit" of light rail is it makes it harder to abandon when the going gets tough. The flexibility of buses should be advantage but this flexibility means they're easy to gut in a circumstance of budget deficits. All you are saying "why not have both" but if one is strictly worse than the other, there's no reason to have both, you can do better with one.

barrkel 7y ago

Infrastructure increases land value and benefits people who can afford to live close. Not very surprising. I'm not sure buses would be more egalitarian though. Buses are great for people who are time rich and income poor; buses have far less predictable schedules and are subject to most of the chaos of traffic conditions, even when there are dedicated bus lanes. It still doesn't make a whole lot of sense for wealthy people to ride buses, and I don't think a great bus network would fundamentally alter the inequality dynamics. At least light rail smears out the "well off" zone a bit more.

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

> “As I’ve talked about before, this spatial arrangement had a useful side effect: commuting distance was a part of the cost you had to pay to live the good life. But now, we’re going through this big inversion where downtown is cool again, and we’re losing the self-corrective mechanism we used to have.“ This seems fundamentally wrong to me in a way I find hard to square with someone as familiar with the subject matter as this author. Many theories of valuation of real estate start with basic assumptions about people bidding with offers to pay (to buy / rent living space, buy groceries, etc.) according to their beliefs on how well they can use that land / space. If everyone is rational (clearly not, but not very important here) it means the person who can extract the most value from the land and has enough capital to outbid competitors will get the chance to use the land. This has been true in dense downtown areas where workers compete by working more hours for a long time, such as in downtown Manhattan where bankers and high powered attorneys would live even during the supposed suburban period the author refers to. To these workers, the time cost of commuting was not worth the extra space or “the good life” as the author calls it (which paints a very confusingly biased presentation). Instead, the marginal value of proximity to work more was valued higher. Now, hardly due to “downtown being cool again,” white collar work is swinging in a direction where it’s not just bankers and attorneys who see the deal of reduced commute time in order to work more as a good thing, rather it’s tech workers, marketers, knowledge workers of all types. Everyone feels pressured to work more and be seen visibly working more, for status signalling. Employers are less loyal to workers than ever, so you need to live close to many other possible employers, to switch to ass-in-chair long hours signalling at the new place once the current place lays you off. You have to pay $3000/month rent, huge grocery bills, receive poor retirement benefits all predicated on blind faith in equity markets, to be in this frantic hedonic treadmill cycle just to barely keep a job and have even the tiniest chances at social mobility. It seems quite obvious that service workers, low status jobs like teaching, blue collar work would immediately get pressed hard to push out and eat the costs of longer commutes. Their “good life” is having structured hours (don’t get me wrong, they are woefully underpaid and have poor negotiation power) instead of being compelled to do constant social signalling of more and more hours. This all just seems like a consequence of labor collapsing in on itself in a slapdash scramble to grab enough money to possibly retire comfortably while capital just keeps taking increasingly larger shares of generated wealth.

GhostVII 7y ago

The nice thing about light rail is that it can actually make public transit more convenient than driving in dense areas, if the tracks are separate from the road. On a bus you are stuck in the same traffic as everyone else, so you might as well just be driving your own car instead. Light rail discourages driving, decreasing congestion, while busses add to it.

icebraining 7y ago
Well, you can make a bus-only lane, if the street is wide enough.
ramshorns 7y ago
That's more a function of the street design than the transit technology. Streetcars in mixed traffic are about as slow as buses, and buses in dedicated lanes are about as fast as light rail.

jeremyvisser 7y ago

This is a lengthy article, yet the author fails to address any of the concerns he claims to be countering. He claims only the rich use light rail. But what is it about a light rail that causes a poor person to look at it and walk away deciding it's not for them? It simply doesn't make sense. Build LRT to a poor area, people will use it. He then shows an infographic of a hypothetical city covered in bus routes, alongside the same city covered by one LRT route through a gentrified area. This is unfair. How about comparing equivalent LRT routes with bus routes? Money sunk into buses is money no longer spendable on LRT. There's an infographic that shows bus route ridership compared to LRT route ridership but we learn only the what, not the why. Also, the article makes no mention whatsoever of Melbourne, an example of LRT working very well for over a century. I'm disappointed to say that I learned exactly nothing reading the article.

taneq 7y ago
> Build LRT to a poor area, people will use it. I thought one of the major issues with light rail was how much it costs vs. just using buses? If a last-mile transport option is nice but very expensive then it'll only be installed in richer neighbourhoods and therefore largely be used by richer people.
- mehhh 7y ago
  Sub-area equity and ridership analysis are used to counter this, hence Seattle building its light rail network through one of the poorest & highest transit ridership parts of town, and continuing it north through U-District (where cheap studios can still be had) up to Northgate and eventually Everett. Would be gentrifiers are in for a rude awakening: http://theneedling.com/2019/08/12/thousands-of-engineers-flee-rainier-beach-suffering-from-premature-gentrification/ http://theneedling.com/2019/08/12/thousands-of-engineers-fle...
cjf4 7y ago
>But what is it about a light rail that causes a poor person to look at it and walk away deciding it's not for them? It simply doesn't make sense. Build LRT to a poor area, people will use it. It's generalization based on access. In order to be viable, LRT almost always runs through affluent areas where influential people live, and the areas that aren't affluent near the path are likely to gentrify. It's not that people from lower income neighborhoods won't ever use LRT, it's that they are less likely to based on their communities' geography.

deft 7y ago

"this is what rich people think poor people want" - rich person

kazoo_energy 7y ago

In cities with high traffic, rapid transit buses cannot compete with light rail that has right of way. LRT can move more people faster, and it can also move strollers, bicycles, and wheelchairs.

dehrmann 7y ago
San Francisco has a lot of bus and taxi-only lanes downtown so that buses have more reliable schedule and faster transit times.
icebraining 7y ago
Buses can take strollers, and even bikes; the important thing is to allow people to board through the middle and back, directly to the open areas left for those items, rather than forcing them through the front. And then have ticket validators throughout the bus, so they don't have to leave the stroller.
- __rvnykk 7y ago
  Maybe it depends on the area but bikes definitely aren't welcome in my area. There are bike racks, but I mentioned in another comment they're not a good alternative. And certainly no room / not welcome in the buses themselves
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Well, here we have (some) bus lines where you can just enter with your bike: https://euroveloportugal.com/files/2016/02/servico_bike_bus_carris.jpg https://euroveloportugal.com/files/2016/02/servico_bike_bus_...

bryanlarsen 7y ago

From what I can tell, Toronto is a good argument for subways and light rail. Many bus routes exist mainly to feed rail, without rail the buses wouldn't have the ridership they do have.

qwerty456127 7y ago

> In the 60s and 70s, remember, cities were seen as undesirable. The goal was to live in the suburbs; farther away was more desirable than closer in. This still is awesome if you have a remote job. E.g. I hate big cities almost as much as I hate to drive. All we need is to stop concentrating business (e.g. by increasing commercial property and corporation taxes significantly wherever big business concentration is too high) and to develop public transport, whatever a technology. Even when this does not seem financially viable in the short term.

icebraining 7y ago
Businesses already pay a rent premium when they concentrate. Maybe we should change the reasons that lead them to do that instead of just punishing them for it.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  What's the reason? How is it so significant they choose to pay? Or could they pay more perhaps? If they could might the money be used to subsidize public transport and remote businesses development? Also how does it happen the New York subway is such a disaster while there is so much big business money in New York?
  - icebraining 7y ago
    > What's the reason? How is it so significant they choose to pay? I don't know! I'm saying we should find out before advocating policy changes. > Or could they pay more perhaps? If they could might the money be used to subsidize public transport and remote businesses development? Funding public transport is nice, but it doesn't actually solve the issue you were complaining about. As for subsiding remote business development, what do you have in mind? It seems to be quite funded already. Would dumping some extra money really change anything? > Also how does it happen the New York subway is such a disaster while there is so much big business money in New York? Another good question that should be answered before policy changes can be formulated.

__rvnykk 7y ago

The argument in the article seems to be mainly focused on gentrification, which is a huge can of worms, but I disagree with the implied notion that increasing the value of any land is inherently without merit (I say this as someone in the lower-middle class). Ottawa's LRT just got started a few days ago, and I for one am super happy about it. As a cyclist, the train offers a huge amount of freedom (even though I don't live too close to a station). The buses here do accommodate bicycles, in theory, but in practice making your bus driver and a hundred passengers wait multiple minutes to hook your bike to the front isn't very appealing. With the train I can just walk on. Ultimately, I think this argument is against a single point, but there are many points to be made in favour that were left uncovered.

welliman 7y ago

I’m not buying this. I ride the light rail in Minneapolis a fair amount and others on it don’t look or act rich at all. In fact the express bus I frequently take seems to be full of more affluent people than the light rail.

Steltek 7y ago

The real trick is buried: dedicated bus lanes. You can't get reliable, frequent service without bus only lanes that are camera enforced. LRT is popular because it usually gets a dedicated RoW which makes service look amazing next to a bus stuck in traffic.

shkkmo 7y ago

TLDR; Don't reduce bus funding to pay for light rail.

appleflaxen 7y ago

> The Koch brothers, of all people, funded an anti-LRT campaign in Phoenix Why is it surprising that a massive private petrochemical conglomerate would be against mass transit?

adjkant 7y ago
Let's also not forget they are avidly against buses too. Not sure what bringing their name up in this piece does for the point of the article. If anything it makes me cast doubt in the points if the ad campaigns they have run (shown to be quite ridiculous by Hassan Minaj and others) influenced them without more of a critical eye to the arguments.

opportune 7y ago

Perhaps rich people only take LRT because it's actually good enough to not drive over taking the bus? If I take the bus I know it's going to take significantly longer than if I just drove instead, especially if I have to transfer. I would be fully in favor of making the bus network where I live better, but as a daily caltrain rider, I can't imagine actually replacing the caltrain route with a bus route. I don't understand how you can dislike LRT and then point out the benefits of Toronto's system of using LRT for heavy transit and bus for last mile. The bus is not good for long transits, and people want to use public transportation for long transits... we need trains for that. In fact, reducing long transits are what you want to go after. They spend more time on the road otherwise and thus contribute a disproportionate amount of traffic. Plus since they are faster than driving (usually) they also actually get drivers off the road

icegreentea2 7y ago

I think this article conflates two different concepts. One is the physical mode (bus vs light rain vs heavier track/subway), and the other the purpose (rapid transit vs not). You can use buses to implement some form of rapid transit (the article's references to Brampton and Mississauga for example are both implementing Bus Rapid Transit systems). In these systems, you have buses running effectively the same role as LRT, except on a dedicated road surface instead of rails. BRTs are great, but cannot scale up as much as LRTs. There may be a reasonable argument that some of the cities with lower performing LRTs maybe should have implemented BRTs as a better investment. However, I think that BRTs more or less cause all the same issues that the author is worried about LRTs about. Fundamentally, this is about the relative investment that a city should make into building concentrated high capacity lines vs spreading low capacity coverage over area. Light Rail vs Buses is a red herring.

ramshorns 7y ago

>Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to set up a bus route that works well. You need buses, drivers, and some paint to make dedicated lanes and transit priority intersections. It's actually even easier than that, in a sense. Most Toronto bus routes have no dedicated lanes and little or no transit signal priority, and they still manage to carry lots of people. The schedules aren't as reliable as they would be with some more priority, but they're frequent enough (10 minutes or better) that it doesn't matter.

markus92 7y ago

Interesting point the article makes: better have more decent bus lines than fewer, elatively less useful lightrail lines. When looking at European cities, which are less car-centric, lightrail is usually built when it makes economic sense: most forms of LRT have higher fixed costs, but lower marginal operating costs per passenger as soon as a certain level of ridership is reached, as well as a higher maximum capacity. Though there is some level of cause/effect - rail is more popular with passengers as it's more comfortable usually - this doesn't outweigh the economic argument. With the numbers across the Atlantic, might as well just run busses. Once ridership is high enough, upgrading to LRT is always a solution. By the time that happens, it'll most likely pay for itself.

rossdavidh 7y ago

Misses one of the advantages of buses over light rail: flexibility to change. My hometown of Austin, TX is no role model for urban transit, but we have added bus-only lanes downtown in recent years, and also moved bus lines around a bit to use the existing number of buses and drivers more efficiently. A lot of this was based on feedback from users and also in response to the way the city changed over time. Light rail, intrinsically, is more expensive to modify, and harder to get buy-in to modify. This means that, if your city population is changing at all fast, you will inevitably end up with a rail system that is at best, built for the city you once were. Buses, because they use the same network as the cars, are inherently better suited for adapting quickly (uh, I mean "less slowly") to the way the city changes.

flukus 7y ago
Flexibility is a huge downside to anyone that depends on public transport. When you move in somewhere or buy a property access to public transport this is a big consideration and you don't want it to disappear one day.

asveikau 7y ago

The first point I really took issue with was this: > farther away was more desirable than closer in Before the current urban renaissance, this was absolutely not true. Inner suburbs were often nicer, especially if adjacent to a "nice" part of a city. People still lived very far from the urban core, commuting to the city, and that was cheaper and less desirable than an inner suburb.

SECProto 7y ago

This article mostly boils down to "Toronto has a lot of popular bus routes, other cities should just make bus routes work better instead of building LRT." This misses the key difference, even though it is pointed out elsewhere in the article. Toronto first built two long subway routes with simple layouts. Suburban residents demanded better transit, so a number of fast, frequent (and therefore convenient) bus routes feeding the subway were created. Fifty years later, ridership on bus routes and subway routes is very high. Cities that are building LRTs generally have fairly efficient bus systems already. Take Ottawa for a local example - they have had BRT to the suburbs for decades. Fast, separated lanes, etc. They are building an LRT in sort of a mirror of the Toronto system - two central lines, one E-W one N-S, and bus routes will feed into it. The train is fast, frequent, reliable - so transfering will not cause issues. This is being done to replace, essentially, fleets of buses leaving downtown every couple minutes, following the exact same routes for 10+ km before diverging. Replacing that initial section with a higher density mode, and changing the buses into suburban feeders, makes perfect sense. Aside: I think the title is clickbait, and I think it makes a lot of statements without any citations (eg, "Montreal is much more European in layout and mindset" [so we should ignore it in our analysis]. Or "The area around the LRT lines definitely attract investment, but if you look at who actually uses the line a few years in, it’s mostly rich people.") Other comment: While it points out Toronto's real bus route successes (high ridership numbers), it ignores the real issues they have had with building more subway/LRT lines over the last 30+ years. They have approved and cancelled some kind of Downtown Relief Line numerous times. Overfull buses is an actual issue in TO. note: It took me a while to read the article and write this comment, so I'm sure some/all has been duplicated in other comments

__rvnykk 7y ago
Phase 1 opened on the 14th, it's very nice so far
- SECProto 7y ago
  Yup! It is definitely good, a little hard to assess until they stop the concurrent service in a couple weeks. I also think Phase 2 will make it work much better - ending at Blair means there is still a lot of route duplication in the east end (and I assume west is similar)

cmrdporcupine 7y ago

As someone who has lived in the greater Toronto area for years, I've seen its public transit system go from good to absolutely awful in a twenty year period. The system he lauds as excellent has not scaled, especially in the downtown, dense, core, where the streetcars and subways are jammed full and delayed constantly.

quickthrower2 7y ago

I am in favour of buses, bus lanes and roads because they are flexible. Buses can be reasonably fast, and routes can be adjusted as time goes on to adjust for population changes, such as new apartment blocks. They also can be electric. You still need trains though as a way to get a lot of people in from more populated suburbs. Light rail I find a bit useless in many circumstances because it is so slow and stops so frequently. I guess that might vary per implementation. It's good if you happen to live within 5 minutes of the station and don't want to go further than 5 minutes walk at the other end. I use car/bus/train/uber. Sometimes ferry. But never light rail!

wwweston 7y ago

Some good observations here, maybe especially the point that without a good bus network light rail can become luxury transport. But speaking as someone who sometimes uses rail in Los Angeles of all places (and in fact has used public transport almost exclusively for the last month), a couple of counterpoints seem worthwhile: * In a sprawl-y traffic dense city like Los Angeles -- or even in a less dense area like Utah's Wasatch Front where traffic density in a few corridors heavily outweighs capacity at peak travel times -- rail as a backbone isn't just a nicer bus, it's a more efficient bus, and probably more efficient than a bus can be short of something like LA's Metro Silver Line which utilizes the 110 to provide express service. If you want an efficient system, rail backbones might not be the only tool in your box, but they should be one of them. * The light rail systems I'm most familiar with (LA Metro and Utah TRAX & Frontrunner) definitely get used, and especially heavily used at commute times. The last few weeks when I've used the Metro I've seen the Expo and Gold line cars packed to the point of no more standing room during rush hour, and people have to wait for the next car. That's past capacity usage in a city most people don't naturally associate with public transportation. * Additionally, while I can't claim any unusual ability to discern socioeconomic status on sight, informal observations about the level of diversity I've seen on my rides suggests it's not majority middle/upper class riders. And on the LA lines that have seen falling usage (Green and Blue), the research IIRC seems to say the riders who went elsewhere got cars, suggesting they were low-income and rode for economic reasons beforehand. * The unstudied rail supporter insistent of its virtues and indifferent to other forms of public transport is NOT one that I frequently encounter. I may be wrong, my observation sample may be biased in several ways, but I would expect that if you polled a sample of rail supporters on the question of whether high-quality bus service is equally important, a majority of them would say yes. If you picked self-identifying new urbanists (presumably the people the author spends some of his own credibility on caricaturing as scare-quoted “forward-thinking” brunch people) I expect that percentage would be even higher and you'd find them more than ready to share their own ideas on last-mile problems and cost-per-passenger-mile of rail-vs-bus plus bonus topics like whether/how ride-hailing apps, electric scooters, and bicycles should fit into all this.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

This made me look up Caltrain Daily ridership[1] which is about 65K/day. Now Caltrain is not considered "light rail" because it uses regular rails and locomotives with their accompanying "full size" train cars. Versus the lighter framed "light rail" cars that VTA uses for its service. It is interesting that while CalTrain is over crowded at commute times and struggles with having enough capacity, the light rail system is underutilized. Citylab covered some of the issues of the light rail system but I would really like a transportation expert's evaluation of Bart/Caltrain/Muni/Lightrail/Bus service in the greater Bay Area. There seems to be a huge opportunity here even though I get that there are big systemic forces that resist making those changes. [1] http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/_Marketing/pdf/2018+Annual+Passenger+Counts.pdf?v=2 http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/_Marketing/pdf/2018+Annual+Pa...

pcwalton 7y ago
> It is interesting that while CalTrain is over crowded at commute times and struggles with having enough capacity, the light rail system is underutilized. True in San Jose—VTA is one of the least functional public transit systems in the entire country—but not in San Francisco. The state considers Muni Metro to be overcrowded, in fact: https://mtc.ca.gov/sites/default/files/CCTS_FebWorkshop_BreakoutHandout_ShortMed_SFMetro_FINAL.pdf https://mtc.ca.gov/sites/default/files/CCTS_FebWorkshop_Brea...

bryanlarsen 7y ago

Starting with a definition is probably useful. To many "LRT" means the type of rail system that doesn't have a fully dedicated right of way, it has crossings rather than over/under passes. I agree that those are quite silly; a lot of expense for little benefit over buses. To others, an LRT is fully or almost fully dedicated. It often doesn't provide much benefit over a fully dedicated BRT, but its cost isn't substantially different from a BRT either -- it's the right of way, the stations and those over/under passes that cost the large bulk of the money. A good BRT will cost billions so you might as well spend a little bit more to get the cachet and the capacity of a rail system.

rootusrootus 7y ago

He makes a good point. Where I live (Portland, Oregon) we have dumped most of our transit money into LRT. As a result, even though I live within the urban limits, if I want to take public transit downtown it's a little over 2 hours by bus -- there's a stop .22 miles away, but the schedule is once an hour on weekdays, not at all on weekends. Google actually suggests it would be faster if I walked 46 minutes to another bus line that would then get me to the LRT, and it would only take about 1.75 hours total. Or, I can just drive 20 minutes into the office. I'd love to be able to take public transit but I'm not giving up an extra couple hours of my day to use it.

sandworm101 7y ago
Same here. Bus doesnt start until 6am. So it never works for me. Biuld all the rails you want, spend billions on tunnels, if i cannot get to/from work on time it all means nothing.

carapace 7y ago

TL;DR: > Anyway I’m going through all of this to say two things. First, you can move a lot of people by bus if you need to; the TTC is a good demonstration that large numbers of people will take bus routes for their regular commute if the network is well-run and gets them to where they need to go. Second of all, unless your city is really dense or you have infinite money to spend, any public transit system that wants to actually provide coverage across the entire city is going to need a good bus network. > Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to set up a bus route that works well. You need buses, drivers, and some paint to make dedicated lanes and transit priority intersections. The cost just isn’t on the same magnitude as expropriating land, ripping it up, putting in rails, and then running trains all day. > If an LRT line is carrying a daily load of passengers that could be handled by a bus route (as nearly all of them could be, and are, here in Toronto) then its purpose for existing isn’t “higher order transit”, it’s “luxury public transit”.

smileysteve 7y ago

He's not wrong about busses having many advantages, particularly in time to live and direct costs, but 2 things. 1. Without dedicated right of way, the wealthy won't ride OR fund (because they don't understand who would ride over drive) busses 2. The flexibility of buses is also their downfall. These areas won't get gentrified by businesses because if crowds do come, they may be temporary.

mehrdadn 7y ago

I didn't know some of these terms had slightly different (but overlapping) meanings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_rail_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_rail_terminology

arunpuri 7y ago

This is Rail Transport Map from 2 cities I have experienced Singapore (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Singapore_MRT_and_LRT_System_Map.svg/900px-Singapore_MRT_and_LRT_System_Map.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Si...) Delhi (https://lunchtigestbi.cf/photo/bab1f2ab4a3df96bd85c5eae309218c0.jpg https://lunchtigestbi.cf/photo/bab1f2ab4a3df96bd85c5eae30921...) Both of them work due to different reasons. Singapore, it goes hand-in-hand with urban planning (and buses and other transport initiatives) and Delhi as Roads infra was cracking and with people living in city and working in sub-urbs taking train makes more sense than spend 2-3 hours in commute.

rjsw 7y ago

I live in a city with light rail [1], it goes to several of the poorer areas. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Metrolink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Metrolink

nayuki 7y ago

Other long articles where Toronto is praised for its bus and streetcar network, and how they feed passengers into the subway system: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/08/how-america-killed-transit/568825/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/08/how-america-k... https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/10/while-america-suffocated-transit-other-countries-embraced-it/572167/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/10/while-america...

xvilka 7y ago

A lot of the cities build subway or tram stations in underdeveloped areas as a precursor of future expansion. And it works - after subway stop starts to work more developers start to build high-rises, shops, people start to move there from other underdeveloped areas without prospects of having a subway station. I see this article as an excuse against proper city and public transportation planning. It works everywhere but US, so maybe it's time to stop arguing and follow the example of other countries?

gok 7y ago

When the author says LRT they seem to be explicitly referring to streetcars. Which are, yeah, generally pretty stupid. Build real rapid transit or run buses. If you want to get rich people to ride the buses, add express routes that bypass poor neighborhoods.

crushingcrash 7y ago

Montreal’s subway is phenomenal.

nphd 7y ago

Extra-long or double-decker buses have crush load capacities around 120 pax. A single Bart trainset can have a crush load capacity of about 2000 pax and can depart every 2 minutes. So you would need a double decker bus departing roughly every 7.2 seconds to match that peak throughput. It just doesn't scale.

ykevinator 7y ago

This is the left talking to the left. To get better coverage, use fewer words (because the right is dumb but equal).

emmelaich 7y ago

Pros with rail * smooth * quiet Cons * fixed infrastructure - one breakdown or labour strike will bring the whole thing to grinding halt. You can't just simply move a lot of carriages to other places easily in response to demand * expensive We'd be much better off with better (bigger, electric/hybrid) buses.

purplezooey 7y ago

I share some of the concerns but in many cases it's just the best you can do. Unfortunately we can't use eminent domain as much now to get better right of ways. Always some angry person or interest in the way.