
Why I don't love Light Rail Transit - dweekly
https://danco.substack.com/p/why-i-dont-love-light-rail-transit
======
trynewideas
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.

~~~
joe_the_user
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.

~~~
wwweston
> it's only benefit is bragging rights since it can never be faster than
> ordinary traffic

Since the author is including LA's rail system in his stats, I'll just say
that this is not correct here. Metro Rail lines are frequently faster than
surface traffic along close parallel routes and often faster than with-flow
freeway traffic, which is not particularly surprising considering that at most
crossings they're either given bridges, tunnels, or signal-protected right-of-
way.

You could argue that we could do the same thing with buses, but to the extent
that a bus line requires special infrastructure to support the more efficient
travel, any cost-efficiency advantage is likely to narrow or disappear.

~~~
novok
I think all that matters is if a transit system has exclusive right of way
lanes that doesn't interference from the general road network is what would
make it fast. If it uses busses, light rail or heavy rail, the difference is
only throughput.

For many people although LRT means a train sharing the road, sometimes, which
make them as slow as busses, for a lot more money for something that doesn't
have the same throughput demands, which I agree when I've tried out sf muni.

~~~
ppseafield
Agreed. Portland's light rail is quick until you get to downtown, where it
shares the road with cars. Where I lived at one point, taking the bus was much
faster. Additionally every train line has to cross one particular bridge,
which is a massive choke point. A subway or elevated would be much quicker.

~~~
trynewideas
I'm staring at an Orange Line train outside my window that crosses the Tilikum
but doesn't cross the Steel, but yeah, Red/Blue/Green are bottlenecked there.
The contrast between the lines that go over the Steel bridge and the lines
that don't are kind of my point, though.

~~~
ppseafield
The orange line becomes the yellow line, which also crosses the Steel bridge.

~~~
trynewideas
But the Orange line still terminates at PSU, and it also sometimes becomes the
Green at PSU. You also don't have to stay on the train past city center, and
Steel Bridge raises don't affect the intended Orange Line service to and from
city center; trains just circulate at Union to minimize delays.

That's by design, which is my point. The Yellow and bus lines across the Steel
are always affected more than the Orange line, and the ability to terminate at
Union on a bridge raise allows for bus transfers over other bridges—it's
integrated to play to the strengths of combining bus, streetcar, and LRT, and
minimize the weaknesses of the Steel bottleneck. It's also why it's not just a
Yellow line extension south.

------
SECProto
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

~~~
bryanlarsen
Ottawa's LRT isn't really LRT as most people think about it. The "light" size
of LRT makes it legal to have crossings in an urban area. Ottawa's LRT is
fully dedicated, there are no crossings. So it has the benefits of medium or
heavy rail, and doesn't have the typical drawbacks of light rail. Can you
imagine spending billions on light rail without a fully dedicated right of
way? That'd be silly, and the article would make more sense.

~~~
SECProto
> Ottawa's LRT isn't really LRT as most people think about it.

I don't think you can generalize like that - Canada (where both the Author and
I live) has 4-5 LRT systems, with several more under construction [1]. The
light rail in Calgary is the longest, it is not grade separated (it has
intersections inside and outside the downtown area). I feel that it also works
pretty well. Toronto has the St Clair streetcar and is building the Eglinton
LRT, which is/will be partially separated, I also feel they are/will be an
integral part of the network. The full separation of Ottawa's system is a big
advantage, to be sure, but it is only possible because it is upgrading from a
BRT which was also almost fully grade separated (otherwise, land acquisition
costs would have been dramatically higher).

The grade separation of the O-train is incidental to the point I was making -
an LRT can make a great core of a transit network, using frequent train
service instead of route duplication in Bus/BRT service.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail_in_Canada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail_in_Canada)

------
ricardobeat
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...](https://almeretours.com/wp-
content/uploads/2019/03/Amsterdam-Transportion-Map-2019.jpg)

~~~
maxsilver
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
> 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.

------
markus92
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.

------
opportune
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

------
jeremyvisser
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.

~~~
rossdavidh
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
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.

------
kick
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
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
"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"

------
Steltek
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.

------
rootusrootus
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
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.

------
__rvnykk
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.

------
wwweston
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.

------
jb_s
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
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-
th...](https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/10/12/brt-is-not-cheaper-than-light-
rail/)

~~~
__rvnykk
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)

------
aaronbrethorst
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-
rich...](https://www.propublica.org/article/how-some-of-americas-richest-
towns-fight-affordable-housing)

------
appleflaxen
> 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
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.

------
ChuckMcM
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+Pa...](http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/_Marketing/pdf/2018+Annual+Passenger+Counts.pdf?v=2)

~~~
pcwalton
> 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_Brea...](https://mtc.ca.gov/sites/default/files/CCTS_FebWorkshop_BreakoutHandout_ShortMed_SFMetro_FINAL.pdf)

------
asveikau
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.

------
icegreentea2
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.

------
kazoo_energy
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.

~~~
icebraining
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
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
Well, here we have (some) bus lines where you can just enter with your bike:
[https://euroveloportugal.com/files/2016/02/servico_bike_bus_...](https://euroveloportugal.com/files/2016/02/servico_bike_bus_carris.jpg)

------
bryanlarsen
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.

------
bryanlarsen
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.

------
GhostVII
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.

~~~
ramshorns
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.

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

------
arunpuri
This is Rail Transport Map from 2 cities I have experienced Singapore
([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Si...](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))

Delhi
([https://lunchtigestbi.cf/photo/bab1f2ab4a3df96bd85c5eae30921...](https://lunchtigestbi.cf/photo/bab1f2ab4a3df96bd85c5eae309218c0.jpg))

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.

------
rossdavidh
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
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.

------
quickthrower2
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!

------
rjsw
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
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-k...](https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/08/how-america-
killed-transit/568825/)

[https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/10/while-
america...](https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/10/while-america-
suffocated-transit-other-countries-embraced-it/572167/)

------
barrkel
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.

------
ramshorns
> _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.

------
qwerty456127
> 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
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
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
> 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.

~~~
qwerty456127
E.g. I live in a European city with awesome public transport - it's
comfortable, cheap, precise, frequent, fast and goes everywhere. I totally
enjoy this but this provokes 2 thoughts:

What if I move to the US occasionally (for some years at least) - will I be
forced to drive a car because public transport is bad, expensive and doesn't
go everywhere there? I doubt I'm going to be able to afford (or even like)
living near the office in a city centre. This frightens me.

Despite the public transport is amazing at my location and you can even get to
a neighboring town quickly, comfortably and at no additional cost (unlimited
public transport subscription card is cheap and covers heavy rail together
with light rail, subway, buses and even ferries), businesses still concentrate
near the center (not even in alternative districts of the city) of the capital
and the only businesses you can find in neighbouring towns are e-shop + very
small businesses providing essential services to the locals. No IT companies
of any kind (but above mentioned small e-shops and small hardware stores) or
anything like that. Why? If I were a full time developer I'd love to live in
such a town and work in an office there (in fact I used to live there but the
office still was in the megapolis center, thanks to the trains it wasn't a
problem), needless to say office rent is a way cheaper there. Why does this
phenomenon take place and how might we stimulate geographic dispersion of
businesses? Set particularly low taxes where we want them to move perhaps?

When the IT boom was beginning about 15 years ago I thought IT companies are
going to build developer campuses, call centers etc in cheaper towns because
this can save tons of money while IT workers can work anywhere thanks to the
Internet (and, thanks to the great public transport system, they still can get
anywhere quickly once they need to attain some kind of event). But, as we can
see now, this is not the case.

------
xvilka
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?

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smileysteve
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.

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nphd
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.

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emmelaich
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.

------
mehrdadn
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)

------
gok
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.

------
welliman
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.

------
purplezooey
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.

------
carapace
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”.

------
cmrdporcupine
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.

------
shkkmo
TLDR;

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

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

------
mlthoughts2018
> “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.

------
crushingcrash
Montreal’s subway is phenomenal.

------
nerdponx
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.

