
Why I don’t love light rail transit - 9nGQluzmnq3M
https://alexdanco.com/2019/09/12/why-i-dont-love-light-rail-transit/
======
joe_the_user
Buses 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
> 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
I mean street cars, trains that run on streets behind and in front of cars.

~~~
Scoundreller
That’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
Pedantic 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.

------
jacquesl
It’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.

~~~
manigandham
It's also a geographic, real-estate, and political problem. There's not enough
density in enough areas with enough last-mile coverage for trains to work like
other countries.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Many cities solve this chicken and egg problem by _building_ the necessary
density next to the train station. Hong Kong and Japan are the most famous
examples, but it works in Singapore and large chunks of Europe as well
(although Parisian banlieues may not be the best model of urban planning for
other reasons...).

~~~
arcticbull
Yes it’s sad to see America’s giving up before even trying. Defeatism I
believe.

~~~
manigandham
It's not useful to generalize like that. America is far bigger than most can
imagine and the current challenges are much greater than the benefits.

The US doesn't just need trains as good as Japan, it needs them to be at least
twice as good for the investments to make sense.

~~~
arcticbull
I have no idea why you think it has to be “twice as good” or what all that
even means.

With that behind us, nobody’s proposing high speed rail from San Diego to
Boston, just LA to SF and along the eastern corridor. And we can’t event have
that. Let’s start small.

~~~
manigandham
It means that unless the trains are moving at 400mph with perfect comfort,
free wifi, and a price of $20, nobody cares.

LA to SF is a 1 hour flight as cheap as $50, with the same last-mile effort
and total trip time as a train. Airlines are also elastic to meet demand
without major capex.

So who's going to spend the 100s of billions to buy the land and build a line
for a 2-3x slower travel option that will take a century to be paid back?
California is actually trying to do this and has failed miserably because the
land and infrastructure costs alone make the project infeasible.

~~~
rumanator
> LA to SF is a 1 hour flight

How long does it take to/from each airport, and how long do you take to go
through security, check-in and boarding?

A 1-hour flight easily becomes a 3 to 4 hour ordeal.

~~~
manigandham
How fast is this train going? And you still need to get to/from the station.
At 200mph it'll also be a 3-4 hour ordeal at least, and more if there are
stops in the middle.

~~~
rumanator
> How fast is this train going?

Typically, the commercial speed of high-speed trains is about 300-350km/h.

> And you still need to get to/from the station.

Train stations tend to be located in the city center, not 50km away.

> At 200mph it'll also be a 3-4 hour ordeal at least, and more if there are
> stops in the middle.

Madrid-Barcelona takes less than 3 hours, and starts/ends near the city center
(check Atocha and Barcelona Santa).

Unlike airplanes, the bulk of the trip is spent sitting comfortably in your
cozy chair with plenty of leg room, internet access, electric outlets, no
noise or pressure fluctuation, and a nice landscape to enjoy.

~~~
manigandham
This thread has gone off the rails. The point isn't that trains are more
comfortable than planes. That's obvious. It's that a train is _not currently
viable_ compared to the existing airline routes.

The US and California are not spending > $100B to build this. Even with all
that comfort, people want cheap and fast. Talking more about how nice trains
are makes no difference to actually getting one built unless you have a plan
on how to acquire all the money, real estate and political will to get it
done.

------
javagram
It 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.

------
Spooky23
Interesting 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.

------
franey
One 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.

~~~
spollo
If 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
It’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...

~~~
jiofih
If you don’t plan at all, you’ll have an average wait time of 7 minutes. How
bad is that?

~~~
DuskStar
Average wait time of 7 minutes _if_ the trains follow the schedule exactly and
don't bunch.

If things are allowed to drift randomly, you end up approximating the
exponential distribution - which has an average wait time of _15_ minutes for
4 trains/hour.

------
scythe
For 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
> 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

------
ummonk
It'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.

------
nine_k
Very-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.

------
mc3
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21044509](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21044509)

------
baskint
Spot 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
Oh, 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.

------
qiqitori
> 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.)

------
tmlee
When 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
Interestingly, 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.

------
Fezzik
I 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
> 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-
po...](https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2019/10/paint-it-red-portland-
gets-first-red-transit-lane-downtown-with-more-coming.html)

------
jfoutz
I 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
From 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.

------
epx
Things moving on rails are beautiful, buses are ugly. Beautiness is important.

------
hristov
This 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.

~~~
noahtallen
I totally agree. A specific example I found insulting was Portland, OR. He
uses it as an example for his argument, but the reality is that our LRT is
still supported by a vastly larger bus network. I live a 15 minute walk / 5
minute drive to the nearest train station, but there are still at least 5 or 6
bus lines closer. Additionally, the bus network still seems well funded. Not
only are busses relatively clean and modern, they also support all the latest
mobile payment options like ApplePay and the iPhone’s new mobile card thingy
that works with RFID just like the trains do.

------
ip26
If 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?

~~~
ramshorns
Yeah. 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.

------
iopq
What? 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?

------
205guy
Streetcars 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
This 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
It'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.

------
andrewflnr
Does 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.

~~~
jcranmer
DC 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
I believe Toronto’s new Eglinton LRT (the first that would be called LRT and
not streetcar) will be exclusively RoW.

------
mshroyer
I 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?

------
chao-
Two 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.

