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Why I don’t love light rail transit
- joe_the_user 7y agoBuses have many advantages over subways, especially over trains running at street level (since these can't go much faster than traffic). The main advantage of subways is ironically that they are inflexible - they can't be gutted in times of budget deficit. And I would suspect this is how Toronto differs from the average American city. American city governments experience periodic budget squeezes that force politicians to gut every service which is gut-able and buses are always a logical target. And this leads to both buses being abandoned due to unreliability and for the bus lines that do exist to, uh, worthless, run at too infrequent intervals to pick up significant ridership. And this lead to buses having a terrible reputation, reinforcing the cycle of poor ridership.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> especially over trains running at street level (since these can't go much faster than traffic) Why would trains at street level be limited in speed by traffic? Trains in the UK run at street level and regularly go over a hundred miles an hour.
- joe_the_user 7y agoI mean street cars, trains that run on streets behind and in front of cars.
- greglindahl 7y agoMany "street cars" have dedicated lanes, and some sometimes run in tunnels and bridges with no intersections with cars at all. So it's worth explaining what you mean up front.
- loeg 7y agoDedicated lane street cars still can't run >100mph, as chrisseaton seems to suggest.
- philwelch 7y agoI live in a city with streetcars with dedicated lanes. They constantly stop and honk at cars that are illegally blocking the dedicated streetcar lane. There are also "bus only" lanes, except the buses can go around blockages sometimes.
- Scoundreller 7y agoThat’s called “streetrunning”. If you check out YouTube you can find some freight trains that have to do that from time-to-time. About a hundred years ago, when Toronto’s streetcar was implemented, they made their gauge slightly narrower than train gauge to prevent “trains” from running along streetcar tracks. They pay for it to this day as it means new streetcars need to be designed for a gauge that nobody else uses. Turning radii is also an issue. Possibly by design or not...
- ramshorns 7y agoPedantic correction: Toronto streetcars and subways are actually slightly wider than standard gauge. The rest of your point is unaffected. The streetcars are not discussed much in the article, but they may be a large part of both Toronto's moderate transit success and its slowness to adopt real light rail transit. Streetcars are seen as similar to buses but a bit faster, more comfortable and more reliable. Which suits them well for the busy downtown routes. But plans for suburban LRT routes have been dismissed as "glorified streetcars", even though they would be much faster due to less frequent stops and more signal priority. Since relatively slow downtown streetcars are the only surface rail people know about, they don't get excited about LRT.
- cardiffspaceman 7y agoIt would seem that the geometry of using bogeys/trucks under carriages/cars requires higher radii for wider gauges. But I haven't worked the math.
- elsurudo 7y agoAre you sure that was the reason they did that? I don't have any evidence, other than that I always assumed it was either cheaper or more practical to have narrower gauges in cities. It seems to be the case for most streetcar networks I've seen...
- jcranmer 7y agoI think what they mean is what's usually called light-rail or trams--train systems that have at-grade intersections with streets.
- andrepd 7y agoI think they mean urban trains, or trams and the like. Intercity trains can of course go as fast as they can.
- CaptainZapp 7y agoBuses have many advantages over subways, especially over trains running at street level (since these can't go much faster than traffic). That's not necessarily so. Trams (streetcars) in cities, which have old tram networks usually segregate the lines from the parts of the street where privat traffic runs. Very often they also receive signalling priority and while blockage by cars can happen (especially on intersections) trams can run with a quite reliable time table. I live in a city with one of the - arguably - best public transport systems at least outside of Japan. If anything runs in unreliable intervals (as you learn over announcemets while sitting in a tram) it's bus lines. Now, if you just build some light rail on an existing road as often happens because public transport is chic nowadays then you run exactly into the problem you describe. But dedicated tram networks are very different and quite reliable.
- joe_the_user 7y agoI read this argument last time so the passage you quote actually take your argument into account. Sure, street level trains can go somewhat faster than cars but not a whole lot. Contrast that Elevated or underground lines, which can go much faster, have express trains and so-forth. The OP makes a great argument that buses plus medium rail/subways/etc is much better combination to add to a city. I think that argument has to be made more loudly, for the other reason - US planners are bad, if there's a to force them to be better it should be taken. Maybe really smart people do light rail well but the US city doesn't deserve to be trusted to do that.
- chao- 7y agoHouston, a city proud to be without zoning, and where being a "city planner" is barely a notch above a registered sex offender (I wish I were joking), has just voted for the third time to expand LRT transit, and expand Rapid Bus lines, and improve the quality of its bus stops, in a $3.5BB bond measure. https://www.khou.com/article/traffic/metro-houston-approves-35b-bond-measure-for-november-ballot/285-3c68ecd2-8bbc-4588-9e9a-8cecd62c3edd https://www.khou.com/article/traffic/metro-houston-approves-... On the other side of things, Austin may get a third crack at approving an LRT system next year, but the last two times Austin voters disapproved of LRT. As a result they have a weird heavy commuter rail that runs on a strange schedule, goes almost nowhere, and does not serve the people well.
- thatfrenchguy 7y agoBuses are slower than getting your car. Metros are faster.
- joe_the_user 7y agoBuses are slower than a car by some amount. A well designed express bus system isn't much slower than however, for longer distances. Sure an actual Metro-type system, like BART in the SF Bay area, Toronto (apparently) or the various marvelous French systems that exist, these are faster than a car. But you might not have experienced the worthless, pathetic hunks of junk that Americans build and call "light rail", these can manage to be slower even than buses and more expensive and less reliable. The San Jose light rail system is a prime specimen, a "transit system" that barely manages to be faster than walking. Of course, when I lived in San Rosa, the bus system also had an expected arrival times identical to walking - I tested this often on Google maps in off-hours. Where I live now, the bus comes twice a day so it's a further world of impractical. Anyway, in America, it's not just that not much money gets put into public transit. it's even just that cities were created around the car. It's that the state, civic fathers, the ruling/managing group, doesn't really think public transit is necessary so much of the money that's allocated can be passed to the rulers' friends since "no one" expects public transit to work.
- andrewflnr 7y agoDoes the DC metro count as light rail? It's... not luxurious. Maybe new light rail is nice, but I've never ridden one. Regardless, I see the point the author is making. I'll probably look harder at the buses around here.
- javagram 7y agoDC Metro is “heavy rail”. What exactly the difference between heavy rail and light rail is a matter of debate in some cases but I don’t think there’s any dispute that DC Metro or NY Subway is heavy rail.
- Scoundreller 7y agoI think heavy rail needs to meet FRA (Fed railway admin) standards. Including things like handling .22cal bullet standards against their glass and other crash tests.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jcranmer 7y agoDC metro is heavy rail. Light rail is generally single or double trainsets running in the street right-of-way or otherwise mostly at-grade intersections. Toronto's streetcars (but not the subway!), SF's Muni Metro, and Boston's Green Line (but not the other ones!) are well-known examples of light rail in North America.
- Scoundreller 7y agoI believe Toronto’s new Eglinton LRT (the first that would be called LRT and not streetcar) will be exclusively RoW.
- ip26 7y agoIf we are comparing to a successful "subway plus bus" model, isn't light rail clearly filling the "subway" role in the model, not the "bus" role?
- franey 7y agoI got that impression, too. There wasn't much mention of bus/streetcar-plus-train transit strategy, which certainly happens in Toronto.
- ramshorns 7y agoYeah. Light rail is cheaper and slower than a subway, and more expensive and faster than buses. A single light rail line may not serve as many people as an extensive bus network, but it may supplement an existing bus network better than a short subway line would for the same cost.
- nine_k 7y agoVery-very short scoop: light rail provides neither the high bandwidth of a subway nor the wide coverage of a bus network, but costs a lot.
- javagram 7y agoIt depends a lot on the city, but in high-traffic areas, buses are extremely slow and unreliable because they have to fight through the traffic jams. Dedicated bus lanes get around this, but it’s very hard to recapture the lane from car traffic at that point since the car drivers will see it as being taken from them. If you’re building a new rapid transit line with dedicated ROW, it then comes down to BRT vs LRT and the cost of BRT and LRT aren’t actually that different I believe. The buses are cheaper up front but the maintenance cost on light rail vehicles is supposedly cheaper (plus, they can use electric power and are cleaner than diesel buses). The article’s criticisms would apply equally to BRT though.
- Fezzik 7y agoI could not agree more. Public transit in the Portland (Oregon) metro area was much better (easier to access, predictable, faster, weather tolerant) when they prioritized buses and had no LRT. Now that the city is all-in on LRT the bus system is neglected and under provisioned. My other big beef with LRT is that cities are dumping hundreds-of-millions of dollars in to single use track - LRT is only used for moving people, whereas money spent on buses funds roads, which benefit all aspects of commerce. Also, on another, tangent, LRT is plagued by weather related woes - at least in Portland, if it is too hot or too cold, the trains cannot even safely run. Bring back the buses!
- cobythedog 7y ago> Bring back the buses! I think the 'red transit lane' is a step in that direction: https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2019/10/paint-it-red-portland-gets-first-red-transit-lane-downtown-with-more-coming.html https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2019/10/paint-it-red-po...
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago> buses funds roads, which benefit all aspects of commerce Thank you but no thank you. We need less money spend on inefficient roads, not more.
- noahtallen 7y agoI haven’t been here long, but I can typically grab a bus everywhere that LRT isn’t. Like the article says, busses can take you to LRT stations and there are a lot of examples of stations bus routes feed into (Gateway TC, Loyd Center, Parkrose TC)
- Spooky23 7y agoInteresting article, except for the mumbo jumbo about feedback loops. Development is all about land and cost. Suburbia hit critical mass because road networks were building out in the postwar economic stimulus and cars were cheaper than traditional infrastructure. Taxes were low because everything was new. The driver of today’s changes is also about cost. We are out of suburban land. If you look at new construction in suburban areas, say around Boston, you see new build outs on shitty parcels. Apartment buildings 50 feet from the interstate, hilltop shopping centers, etc. At the same time, the existing suburban housing stock is old and creaky. I was born in the late 70s, my parents are in their 70s and their house is 40 years old... and basically depreciated. It’s not going to yield great value because it needs lots of work. That’s not an atypical story. A vital city like New York is another great place to look for guidance from. As the old ethnic neighborhoods collapsed, they turned to slums. The slumlords sucked the value out, and left cheap shells that attracted investment.
- jacquesl 7y agoIt’s an incentives problem in the United States. In Japan, for example, the railways are private (so they need to turn a profit) and you usually have supermarkets and department stores on the stations. The stations are the hub. When you look at commuter lines into large cities in the US, you are driving hours to a parking lot with nothing but a platform near by.
- adrianN 7y agoAs I understand it, railway companies in Japan are real estate companies in disguise. They own the land around the stations and make a significant chunk of their money from that. Real estate around train stations is quite valuable.
- barry-cotter 7y agoIsn’t that model illegal in the US?
- manigandham 7y agoNo, why would it be? Any company can own real estate. Here's a more in-depth article explaining it: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/05/secret-tokyos-rail-success/2044/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/05/secret-tokyos...
- alteria 7y agoThe big transcontinental railroads own several feet around the railroad, which is prime real estate for cables and the like.
- jfoutz 7y agoI know this will sound super cynical and overly pedantic. But it's not the Koch brothers anymore. I was by no means a fan, but David is dead. Any funding is on Charles. Or perhaps Charles and David's heirs.
- tom_mellior 7y agoFrom the article linked in the sentence referencing the Koch brothers: "But in 2017, the group received $110,000 in funding from a political arm of Charles and David Koch". Both were alive in 2017.
- baskint 7y agoSpot on. I live in Minneapolis metro area, and commute to downtown Minneapolis via bus. The "express" bus from the suburb is not frequent enough and does not extend far so I can walk to my house after getting off. Instead, I drive a good 10+ minutes to a park & ride, and get on the bus for the 45+ minutes ride to downtown. Also the buses could be electric and more comfortable, and have better lane management. Here in MSP, the transit buses can drive on the shoulder which are in terrible shape.
- baskint 7y agoOh, there was a discussion of an LRT to downtown St. Paul from where I live. We all heard the same arguments about "bringing the wrong kind of people" to our neighborhood. Instead, they are developing bus lines which is the better call, but have to see the ridership. Hope it works out.
- franey 7y agoOne thing I'm surprised this article didn't mention is commute times. To get from Weston Station (northwest of downtown) to Union Station takes: - 22-minute drive (or 1h in rushour) - 1.25-hour bus ride - 13-minute LRT ride LRT (light rail transit) really is an excellent way to get into the downtown core from distances and in time frames that were previously only manageable by car.
- ramshorns 7y agoThat example isn't really LRT, it's either commuter rail or an airport train, which (either way) only stops once during that 13-km trip. LRT normally involves much closer stops.
- franey 7y agoThat could be getting at what confused me about the article. The author mentions the crosstown LRT favourably, and that will link up to the UP commuter/airport line I mentioned, adding another stop. LRT linking to commuter rail lines, subway lines, and bus stops is something the author didn't really mention, but it certainly seems to be the strategy for that line in Toronto. The author is against cutting funding for bus routes, which is reasonable. I guess I just don't see how that is also an argument against using LRT for arterial transportation into downtown cores. If the retort to that is "budgets", then we need increased funding for public transportation, not fewer trains.
- spollo 7y agoIf you are talking about the UPX, that’s not an LRT line. It’s just a regular train. But I don’t think it’s a fair comparison based on routes. On the UPX line those are 1 direct stop apart. For comparison taking the subway would also be more indirect and longer, taking about 40 minutes I would guess.
- Scoundreller 7y agoIt’s also a poor proxy for what really matters: door to door them. UPX runs every 15 mins. If you time it right, great, but if you don’t...
- mc3 7y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21044509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21044509
- epx 7y agoThings moving on rails are beautiful, buses are ugly. Beautiness is important.
- tmlee 7y agoWhen traffic in a city is inherently bad. It sets the foundation for difficulty in solving the problem with buses (increase frequency, priority express buses) In a high traffic situation, ETA gets adjusted from time to time. And buses will struggle to get in/out of stops and delays loom when accident occurs on the road. Poor road planning and building alongside with massive amount of cars on the road is one of the major issue. Maybe workplace hours should be adjusted as a whole or varying tolls based on high demand hours to avoid everyone competing for road space. But I generally agree with the article that buses gets you really far. For a long time Singapore was relying on bus routes to move people around the city state, and progressively build subway lines as the demand and city planning go with it.
- elsurudo 7y agoInterestingly, Toronto has pretty terrible congestion. I haven't lived there in a while, but IIRC "rush hour" is more like 3 hours (morning an evening). And (apparently) the bus network still does a decent job. Not sure how true that is, but I hope they at least added dedicated bus lanes wherever possible.
- ummonk 7y agoIt's interesting to note that many SF residents find the T 3rd Street light rail to be slower and less frequent than the buses that it replaced. I think subways work well because of their grade separation and extreme high capacity, but most surface rights would be better served by buses than light rail, and you can still create separated bus lanes for bus rapid transit instead of separated light rail if you have the money to spend.
- chao- 7y agoTwo things on my mind reading this article are: 1. I am not convinced the idea of commuting as "self-correcting mechanism" was presented well (or much at all). I was expecting to learn a bit more about this point. 2. Half of the points have a counter-example in both Houston and Dallas, where most of the LRT doesn't go to wealthy residential parts of town. Some of those rich parts of town are still actively fighting it coming near them, in fact. Those two cities come to mind because I have experience living in both, and can compare with my experiences living in denser, older cities like Tokyo, Berlin, and Santiago, where a variety of networks were built for different reasons across different eras. Then again, even in Santiago, the the subway stops just before you get too deep into residential parts of Las Condes. But I am also a non-expert, and at the end of the day, instead of going point-for-point and saying "Well, look at what Dallas did. Surely [blah, blah, blah]" there are two factors that weigh heavier on my mind: cost and historical political context. Cost is foremost. While LRT is less efficient long-term, it is cheaper to build transit at-grade by about a factor of five (I read this long ago and forget where, or I would happily source). Histotical context, in that many grand subway systems get built in a time where, for the city to prove it was a top-tier global city, you demonstrated civic grandeur and engineering prowess by building a subway system. The prestige was used to push past the barrier of it being eye-wateringly expensive. Also while we have made these options safer over time, it has come at a (worthwhile, but non-zero) cost of more regulatory checks that have made the cost gap even greater, and harder to cover by dreaming of prestige Both cost and context ultimately combine into political feasibility. For a city like Denver, Dallas or Houston, if you ask the transit wonks who fight the good fight at the municipal level, I don't think you would find many that truly would choose LRT over other commuter rail, all else equal. But all else was not equal. Cost was the big barrier, and the context did not exist to cross that chasm, so they got what they could, when they could. Houston only got its network because of a starry-eyed chance at the Olympics and/or Super Bowl. Originally it was just one line, then a plan for a 5-line network, of which 3 were built, but now possibly up to 4 again. I could write an entire essay on the mistakes made along the way, public and private, in that first line. Just look at the land-use (really the land-lack-of-use) in Midtown between 2000 and 2010 despite the LRT's presence. Yet the power of a network grows with every additional line, so once you at least have something, you might as well leverage that and add to it, rather than sell the public on a completely different approach. In the end, I share the concerns of the author, but I do not see the narrative being quite as clean when I set it against the specific cases I am familiar with.
- normalperson 7y agoctrl + f slow 0 matches
- qiqitori 7y ago> and you’re the one who has to pay the cost of commuting distance In Japan, the company pays for your commute, and the price of your commuter pass has no bearing on your pay. (There is a cap at most companies, and the average is 15170.8 yen per month (according to https://venture-finance.jp/archives/4982 https://venture-finance.jp/archives/4982).) (Unfortunately, as the company is forced to pay for your commute, the company is also allowed to dictate what route to take, which may in some cases mean less comfort. Neither you nor the company pay tax on this money, so misuse (and paying more than necessary could possibly be construed as misuse on part of the company) could in theory have bad consequences.)
- mshroyer 7y agoI can't make the sense of the author's graphs. Is he plotting daily boardings on both the X and Y axes simultaneously? Aside from bus vs. streetcar, what do the varying colors mean?
- scythe 7y agoFor the “changing routes” problem, I like trolleybuses, which won’t be reconfigured and don’t smell like diesel. Real estate near the wires can get the usual infrastructure boost. Dual-mode trolleybuses can also extend service past where the wires are and you still get the advantage of not stopping to charge. The power stations can be reused for a train as well. Dedicated ROW in a city center is mandatory regardless of vehicle if you want reliable service. Toronto seems like a bit of an unfair example when you compare sheer ridership because it’s bigger than all but five US cities.
- elsurudo 7y ago> Toronto seems like a bit of an unfair example when you compare sheer ridership because it’s bigger than all but five US cities Actually the metro area pop. is only beat by LA IIRC, so your point is even understated
- hristov 7y agoThis article is just BS. This is a line used vary often by fossil fuel advocates to dissuade investment in mass transit infrastructure. You see the fossil fuel lobby cannot say "screw mass transit, lets all drive" because after suffering couple of hours in traffic, every citizen will figure out that this theory is unworkable. So instead, they say "we don't need rail, we need buses, and we need to build "bus infrastructure" (which is just roads)." Then of course, the fossil fuel lobby can work behind the scenes to gut the bus budget and the "bus infrastructure" can be used for cars instead. The lobbyists then say "Buses are for ordinary people, railroads are for the rich, blah blah blah". Usually, this line completely ignores the fact that buses and railroads cost about the same in most places. To his credit the author does address this fact here, but his analysis is shallow and downright silly. He says, "yes they cost the same, but railroads are usually in more expensive neighborhoods." Well, yeah we live in age when high density neighborhoods are expensive and getting pricier all the time and Light rail is most suitable for high density neighborhoods. So that is not surprising. And then he complains about how light rail makes home prices go up. Yeah, well that just means it is successful. When a city service is successful, it makes the area it serves more desirable which people from less desirable areas want to move there which makes prices go up. The response to that should not be to make everything less desirable to ensure affordability, but to learn from the successful and desirable places and make all parts as successful and desirable. Thus, eventually there won't be enough rich people to move in, and you will have just a nice affordable livable city. Would you be in favor of setting half a city on fire in order to make the other half more affordable to live in? His graphs show that he is trying to mislead readers. Why do you think he made the color of bus lines in Toronto so similar to the color of light rail in Toronto? Or why did he color certain high usage bus lines that prove his point in bright red, and certain low usage bus lines that do not prove his point in much darker shades, and then in the legend he only said that the bright red lines are bus lines. Or why did he split the most popular Toronto street car line in two? He said "I separated out the 504A and 504B so that they’d fit on the graph; otherwise it’d break the y axis." They would not only break the y axis, buddy, they would also break the entire premise of your article. If he had a dot that represented a light rail line that is much twice as high as any of the bus lines, then his premise that light rail is unnecessary because it can be handled by a bus line kind of goes out the window. But that is the reality. He correctly says that light rail and buses work best in combination with buses being feeders for light rail lines. This increases the ridership of both buses and light rail. But that fact leads to the conclusion that both light rail and buses must be built. This is what most cities try to do nowadays. Instead the author draws the absolutely wrong conclusion that light rail needs not be built. So yeah in conclusion this is a typical professionally made manipulative troll article. It has a couple of nuggets of self evident truth to get some authenticity and not look like a complete troll, it tries to harness a lot of pre-existing anger about an issue (high housing prices) and disingenuously channel that anger towards his issue (less light rail), and it has some graphs that are very carefully designed to be confusing and misleading to the max.
- 205guy 7y agoStreetcars in Toronto are in fact light rail, doesn't that invalidate this entire argument? One can argue some LRT implementations have the same limitations as buses, but you can't call them buses, point to their success, and say that means buses are the only answer. It's clear that Toronto's mix of subway, LRT, and buses are successful, and perhaps that's what should be emulated.
- around_here 7y agoThis person has it all wrong. Suburbs were created artificially, and it just doesn’t matter. Mixed income neighbourhoods are the desired result of all development. The pockets, rings, and regions of classist housing is the problem, not its location or how we navigate them. Yes, the feedback loops is true, blah blah blah, but author needs to dig deeper.
- tuukkah 7y agoIt's not that complicated really - there's a three-level hierarchy in public transport systems: 1. If the road traffic is congested, the solution is bus lanes. 2. If the bus lanes are congested, the solution is light rail rapid transit. 3. If the light rail is congested, the solution is a subway/train line.
- iopq 7y agoWhat? Light rail is really crap. 45 minutes from Sunnyvale to San Jose. It's slower than biking. It's covering like 6 miles in that time. 9 miles an hour? Really?