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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

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.
rossdavidh 7y ago
Whatever the reason, I can say that, for example, in my home town of Austin, Texas, the actual money spent to get urban rail up and running has turned out in practice to be enormously more than for new buslines. Maybe it doesn't have to be that way, but it empirically is, and I don't think Austin is alone in this experience. Perhaps in part because of the cost, the people riding urban rail in Austin are definitely more often professional class, and the people on buses are more often not. I can't say for sure why, but the rail tickets are a little more expensive, and that is the most obvious reason. I have to think that at least part of why the tickets are more, is that the rail lines cost more to get up and running.
- JoBrad 7y ago
  I was under the impression that the initial cost of rail is almost always higher than buses or other non-track transit. The long term cost is supposed to be lower, though.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- mehhh 7y ago
  Austin has repeatedly chosen stunted transit and no usable non-car infrastructure. When I went to visit a friend at Apple in Austin, there was no bus that could take me anywhere near Apple's campus or any of the 4+ story residental complexes that permeate the area, yet there are a crapton of potential riders there! TxTag is also a really poorly designed system, lacking any usage based pricing with TxTag highways often being paralleled by massive 50mph streets on either side. The modus opeandi seems to be subsudize the living daylight out of cars, build no alternatives to it, and act surprised that Austin's traffic is worsening rapidly.
- b3b0p 7y ago
  I moved from Austin Downtown to Minneapolis for almost this reason. I didn't want to buy a car either and many if not most of the jobs are up in Round Rock or too far to bike or walk. I now live downtown Minneapolis and it's been great, I even bought a condo and rent out my parking space for extra money ($200/month). My mortgage is less than my rent was in Austin (after my downpayment of course).
w1ntermute 7y ago
> 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. Are you sure you read the article…? > 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. Why? Because they’re the only people who can afford to take it – not because the fares are too high, but because real estate in the immediate walking area around stations becomes too expensive…Unless you have bus routes or other last-mile ways of getting to the LRT, then it’s going to be a public transit option that’s only available to people who can afford to live nearby. And the nicer you make the line, the higher an income threshold that’s going to require. (Unless you do the hard work of actually integrating the LRT line via last-mile bus routes into all of the other neighbourhoods that aren’t gentrifying.) LRT investment on its own doesn’t expand public transit; it gentrifies it.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  So the claim is more or less: «the only way to keep a poor neighborhood poor while providing public transit is to build public transit that rich people are unwilling to use, because if you build transit that rich people enjoy, they will move in and gentrify the neighborhood»? Seems like a good argument for building a whole lot more light rail, since it’s apparently quite desirable... Maybe if we had more human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere, there would be enough of them to meet the high demand and more such neighborhoods could support mixed-income residents.
  - w1ntermute 7y ago
    Wrong—the claim has nothing to do with what rich or poor people like to use. The claim is that the only way to provide affordable public transit that's sustainably accessible to people who aren't rich (that is, even when gentrification occurs in the city core) is to provide surface transit (buses), which can serve a much larger area than light rail. > Maybe if we had more human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere, there would be enough of them to meet the high demand and more such neighborhoods could support mixed-income residents. Sure—let me know when you find the funding required to build all those "human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere." In the meantime, let's provide affordable transit that's accessible regardless of which neighborhood you live in: high-frequency, reliable buses.
marc_abonce 7y ago
The point being made is that these areas become more expensive after the rail is built, so even if the rail passed though a lower income neighbourhood, it will gentrify in the long term. > 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. Why? Because they’re the only people who can afford to take it – not because the fares are too high, but because real estate in the immediate walking area around stations becomes too expensive. I don't know if this is actually true, but intuitively it seems plausible.
kazinator 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? This is very clear in the article: poor transportation from where they can afford to live to the expensive area around the station.
- jeremyvisser 7y ago
  > This is very clear in the article: poor transportation from where they can afford to live to the expensive area around the station. This is precisely why I'm saying the article doesn't make sense: how about exploring the idea of building the LRT in the non-gentrified areas, i.e. where you would supposedly put your bus routes.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    But then that area would gentrify and those residents would be priced out. To prevent that effect you need to build enough light rail to counteract the gentrification effect. And you can’t do that because rail coasts so much to build.
    - kazinator 7y ago
      Whereas road for buses costs nothing, because it's already there, because we can't imagine a country in which we cannot trace an uninterrupted asphalt path from the driveway of a house in one city, to the driveway of another house in another city.
      - rayiner 7y ago
        Roads cost practically nothing compared to rail. We have two to three million miles of paved roads in this country, and we spend around $200 billion a year maintaining it and building more. People drive 3 trillion miles on highways alone, adding up to a per passenger mile subsidy of $0.01-0.02. Rail subsidies (for local transit) add up to $0.50 per passenger mile.
jwilliams 7y ago
> Also, the article makes no mention whatsoever of Melbourne, an example of LRT working very well for over a century. For those curious about Melbourne's system - this is a train/tram map (there are plenty of buses too): https://www.railmaps.com.au/melbourn.htm https://www.railmaps.com.au/melbourn.htm Ubiquity and scale are important drivers of the success of the network.
- akdor1154 7y ago
  Melbourne is also an example of the split between wealthy gentrified tram-serviced inner suburbs and car-dependant outer suburbia.
  - jwilliams 7y ago
    I think this is true today - but historically many of those suburbs (and the tram network) were very working-class.
  - ruytlm 7y ago
    I'd agree with this, though I'd argue the main reason this split exists today is because as Melbourne has grown outwards in the last 40 years, there has been little serious investment in developing rail capacity to support those outer suburbs. Instead, the government chose to build freeways.
    - jay_kyburz 7y ago
      Then sell them.
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        This. People are stupidly allergic to splitting municipalities but the fact of the matter is that the poorer municipalities in many cases would be better served spending their tax dollars on themselves rather than throwing it into some bigger pot and mostly getting told by the richer portion of the city exactly where/how it gets spent.
rayiner 7y ago
He explains it quite well. Light rail (and heavy rail too) is luxury public transit. Lower income people can’t afford to live near the stops. (The median income of DC Metro riders on most stations is well into the six figures.) Moreover, because rail is so expensive, you can’t build enough of it where it’s not going to rapidly increase surrounding property values, or really provide great coverage into low income neighborhoods. Bus service doesn’t have any of those downsides. At the same time, rail sucks up huge amounts of money that could be spent on better and more frequent bus service instead.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
swsieber 7y ago
I think the main point was that LRT doesnt move more people than an equivalent bus route, yet costs more. Given that, less LRT is built than bus as the scarcity makes it used by only the rich.
slothtrop 7y ago
It's ironic to me because one scandal in Calgary, as I remember it, was extending the LRT to an otherwise rich, secluded area. The residents objected on the grounds they'd be overrun with hooligans.
Pokepokalypse 7y ago
Last year I drove alongside the Phoenix LRT every single day on my way to work. (I don't live anywhere near a stop). His take on who uses it; based on my daily observations of watching people at the stops (and walking through that neighborhood from my parking garage to my workplace) - is totally wrong. Yes, the developers were trying very hard to gentrify that neighborhood. But they were far from succeeding. It'll take many more years. In the meantime, the people who are there now, need it desperately. And as a car-commuter, the LRT was way less disruptive to traffic than busses.
x0x0 7y ago
The author answers that quite clearly. 1 - LRT is much more expensive than buses, but stations have the same catchment area. 2 - Because LRT is desirable, housing prices in the catchment, ie those walkable and bikable to the station, increase rapidly. 3 - Therefore, the majority of the gains are captured by the people who bought or buy housing in the catchment area. This also precludes use of the LRT by poor people, because they can't afford the housing that makes the LRT station usable. 4 - Buses can be used to increase the catchment area and provide essentially last-mile transit, but they generally aren't. Also, the increase of expense of LRT over bus lines often precludes this. The subtext to all of the above is not only is LRT much more expensive, but it's also much less flexible. Moving bus routes is (my guessing?) 5-7 orders of magnitude less expensive than moving LRT.

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.

rossdavidh 7y ago

Whatever the reason, I can say that, for example, in my home town of Austin, Texas, the actual money spent to get urban rail up and running has turned out in practice to be enormously more than for new buslines. Maybe it doesn't have to be that way, but it empirically is, and I don't think Austin is alone in this experience. Perhaps in part because of the cost, the people riding urban rail in Austin are definitely more often professional class, and the people on buses are more often not. I can't say for sure why, but the rail tickets are a little more expensive, and that is the most obvious reason. I have to think that at least part of why the tickets are more, is that the rail lines cost more to get up and running.

JoBrad 7y ago
I was under the impression that the initial cost of rail is almost always higher than buses or other non-track transit. The long term cost is supposed to be lower, though.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mehhh 7y ago
Austin has repeatedly chosen stunted transit and no usable non-car infrastructure. When I went to visit a friend at Apple in Austin, there was no bus that could take me anywhere near Apple's campus or any of the 4+ story residental complexes that permeate the area, yet there are a crapton of potential riders there! TxTag is also a really poorly designed system, lacking any usage based pricing with TxTag highways often being paralleled by massive 50mph streets on either side. The modus opeandi seems to be subsudize the living daylight out of cars, build no alternatives to it, and act surprised that Austin's traffic is worsening rapidly.
b3b0p 7y ago
I moved from Austin Downtown to Minneapolis for almost this reason. I didn't want to buy a car either and many if not most of the jobs are up in Round Rock or too far to bike or walk. I now live downtown Minneapolis and it's been great, I even bought a condo and rent out my parking space for extra money ($200/month). My mortgage is less than my rent was in Austin (after my downpayment of course).

w1ntermute 7y ago

> 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. Are you sure you read the article…? > 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. Why? Because they’re the only people who can afford to take it – not because the fares are too high, but because real estate in the immediate walking area around stations becomes too expensive…Unless you have bus routes or other last-mile ways of getting to the LRT, then it’s going to be a public transit option that’s only available to people who can afford to live nearby. And the nicer you make the line, the higher an income threshold that’s going to require. (Unless you do the hard work of actually integrating the LRT line via last-mile bus routes into all of the other neighbourhoods that aren’t gentrifying.) LRT investment on its own doesn’t expand public transit; it gentrifies it.

jacobolus 7y ago
So the claim is more or less: «the only way to keep a poor neighborhood poor while providing public transit is to build public transit that rich people are unwilling to use, because if you build transit that rich people enjoy, they will move in and gentrify the neighborhood»? Seems like a good argument for building a whole lot more light rail, since it’s apparently quite desirable... Maybe if we had more human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere, there would be enough of them to meet the high demand and more such neighborhoods could support mixed-income residents.
- w1ntermute 7y ago
  Wrong—the claim has nothing to do with what rich or poor people like to use. The claim is that the only way to provide affordable public transit that's sustainably accessible to people who aren't rich (that is, even when gentrification occurs in the city core) is to provide surface transit (buses), which can serve a much larger area than light rail. > Maybe if we had more human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere, there would be enough of them to meet the high demand and more such neighborhoods could support mixed-income residents. Sure—let me know when you find the funding required to build all those "human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere." In the meantime, let's provide affordable transit that's accessible regardless of which neighborhood you live in: high-frequency, reliable buses.

marc_abonce 7y ago

The point being made is that these areas become more expensive after the rail is built, so even if the rail passed though a lower income neighbourhood, it will gentrify in the long term. > 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. Why? Because they’re the only people who can afford to take it – not because the fares are too high, but because real estate in the immediate walking area around stations becomes too expensive. I don't know if this is actually true, but intuitively it seems plausible.

kazinator 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? This is very clear in the article: poor transportation from where they can afford to live to the expensive area around the station.

jeremyvisser 7y ago
> This is very clear in the article: poor transportation from where they can afford to live to the expensive area around the station. This is precisely why I'm saying the article doesn't make sense: how about exploring the idea of building the LRT in the non-gentrified areas, i.e. where you would supposedly put your bus routes.
- rayiner 7y ago
  But then that area would gentrify and those residents would be priced out. To prevent that effect you need to build enough light rail to counteract the gentrification effect. And you can’t do that because rail coasts so much to build.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    Whereas road for buses costs nothing, because it's already there, because we can't imagine a country in which we cannot trace an uninterrupted asphalt path from the driveway of a house in one city, to the driveway of another house in another city.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      Roads cost practically nothing compared to rail. We have two to three million miles of paved roads in this country, and we spend around $200 billion a year maintaining it and building more. People drive 3 trillion miles on highways alone, adding up to a per passenger mile subsidy of $0.01-0.02. Rail subsidies (for local transit) add up to $0.50 per passenger mile.

jwilliams 7y ago

> Also, the article makes no mention whatsoever of Melbourne, an example of LRT working very well for over a century. For those curious about Melbourne's system - this is a train/tram map (there are plenty of buses too): https://www.railmaps.com.au/melbourn.htm https://www.railmaps.com.au/melbourn.htm Ubiquity and scale are important drivers of the success of the network.

akdor1154 7y ago
Melbourne is also an example of the split between wealthy gentrified tram-serviced inner suburbs and car-dependant outer suburbia.
- jwilliams 7y ago
  I think this is true today - but historically many of those suburbs (and the tram network) were very working-class.
- ruytlm 7y ago
  I'd agree with this, though I'd argue the main reason this split exists today is because as Melbourne has grown outwards in the last 40 years, there has been little serious investment in developing rail capacity to support those outer suburbs. Instead, the government chose to build freeways.
  - jay_kyburz 7y ago
    Then sell them.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      This. People are stupidly allergic to splitting municipalities but the fact of the matter is that the poorer municipalities in many cases would be better served spending their tax dollars on themselves rather than throwing it into some bigger pot and mostly getting told by the richer portion of the city exactly where/how it gets spent.

rayiner 7y ago

He explains it quite well. Light rail (and heavy rail too) is luxury public transit. Lower income people can’t afford to live near the stops. (The median income of DC Metro riders on most stations is well into the six figures.) Moreover, because rail is so expensive, you can’t build enough of it where it’s not going to rapidly increase surrounding property values, or really provide great coverage into low income neighborhoods. Bus service doesn’t have any of those downsides. At the same time, rail sucks up huge amounts of money that could be spent on better and more frequent bus service instead.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

swsieber 7y ago

I think the main point was that LRT doesnt move more people than an equivalent bus route, yet costs more. Given that, less LRT is built than bus as the scarcity makes it used by only the rich.

slothtrop 7y ago

It's ironic to me because one scandal in Calgary, as I remember it, was extending the LRT to an otherwise rich, secluded area. The residents objected on the grounds they'd be overrun with hooligans.

Pokepokalypse 7y ago

Last year I drove alongside the Phoenix LRT every single day on my way to work. (I don't live anywhere near a stop). His take on who uses it; based on my daily observations of watching people at the stops (and walking through that neighborhood from my parking garage to my workplace) - is totally wrong. Yes, the developers were trying very hard to gentrify that neighborhood. But they were far from succeeding. It'll take many more years. In the meantime, the people who are there now, need it desperately. And as a car-commuter, the LRT was way less disruptive to traffic than busses.

x0x0 7y ago

The author answers that quite clearly. 1 - LRT is much more expensive than buses, but stations have the same catchment area. 2 - Because LRT is desirable, housing prices in the catchment, ie those walkable and bikable to the station, increase rapidly. 3 - Therefore, the majority of the gains are captured by the people who bought or buy housing in the catchment area. This also precludes use of the LRT by poor people, because they can't afford the housing that makes the LRT station usable. 4 - Buses can be used to increase the catchment area and provide essentially last-mile transit, but they generally aren't. Also, the increase of expense of LRT over bus lines often precludes this. The subtext to all of the above is not only is LRT much more expensive, but it's also much less flexible. Moving bus routes is (my guessing?) 5-7 orders of magnitude less expensive than moving LRT.