When it comes to transit, there is no 'mode'.

BRT makes a mockery of the 'best for' typology, largely because BRT is such a heterogenous category - quality varies from being heavy-rail competitive to being a bus with slightly nicer stops. (FTA labels aside, most 'BRT' isn't actually 'Rapid'--it lacks exclusive guideway).

American light rail hardly a 'clean' category either - tram-train is the norm, resulting in things like poor Portland (and formerly LA), where a through-corridor suffers a tram section in the middle. All are 'light rail' because they can't share track with 'heavy' rail - metros and commuter rail roads. Light rail is a vehicle crashworthiness standard. 

Having tried to identify all light rail stations (prior to the Transit Politic getting it done) actually transit is bafflingly heterogenous. Even with the 'New Starts' light rail systems, there are three distinct tropes: 1) tram-trains, 2) diesel, and 3) streetcars. 

1) German tram-trains (stadtbahn) are the trope definer for most American light rail - rapid transit service in the suburbs by using a former freight rail corridor, street-running in the central city (to avoid tunneling costs)*. In America, when we lack a freight rail corridor, we've built in freeway medians. 

2) New Jersey River Rail line is the trope definer, but Texas has built a lot of it. Save yourself the costs of electrification (and unsightly catenary) by keeping power generation onboard the vehicle. But that same fix makes stopping and starting both slower and more expensive, so stop spacing is much wider than for electrified traction**. 

3) Portland Streetcar is the trope definer for American streetcars. Portland's modern streetcar uses standard European trams, but that wasn't what got America excited about streetcars--rather, it was Portland's historic streetcars that were the original 'Development-oriented transit'. Supported by a local option tax along the corridor (American transit owes a huge debt to Powell's city of books). The whole concept of a 'pedestrian extender' and using a streetcar as a catalyst for real estate development in a proximate but inaccessible area (Pearl district). All of it street running from go. Over time, Portland has taken streetcar to the next tier, with a streetcar-only bridge, applying the same logic to places across a river. 

*If you put your city center light rail in a tunnel, so it's all rapid transit, it's evolved into a light metro.

** Battery technology may be a game-changer for diesel light rail, permitting both low-cost installation and electric traction levels of acceleration. Getting the brakes right is going to be the sticking point - batteries weigh a lot, so regenerate breaking practically necessary, and the 'trucks' (wheels) on rail vehicles are already complex and putting that much potentially explosive silicon near track is a bit perilous. 

Doubtful battery will be as relevant for trams/streetcars - anyplace that already has transmission lines will keep extending them, so the use-case is marginal--places without systems, for which the competition is BRT, which has a far lower initial investment cost and far better capability for incremental upgrades. 

Commercial Vehicle Electrification

Commercial vehicles like buses are one of the places where vehicle electrification is spreading like wildfire. Climate ideology may have driven the political mandate for developing electric buses, but their adoption is being driven by cold hard dollars. Fuel costs savings were always going to be greatest for the vehicles that spent the most time in motion. But I suspect once we get data on long-term maintenance costs, production of Internal Combustion Engine buses is done. 

Rail is a technical / industrial / complex

"With Japanese consulting and financing, parts of the railway were upgraded to a recognizable commuter network... elevated to remove level crossings. Japanese rolling stock was introduced, and staff received training". 

- Berend Schotanus

Interesting to hear of the Japanese industrial/technical/financial export of metros as an industrial/technical system. Very similar thing in Puerto Rico, except that it's CONUS-style highways rather than trains. But same pattern - development aid as industrial policy. Sponsor nation provides contingent financing which is used to purchase consulting expertise and supports the purchase of sponsor-manufactured vehicles. 

Half the battle for trains in America is overcoming the lack of a domestic railway industrial/technical complex--we have to import the material and the expertise, which generates political resistance to financing. Yet we lack the technical expertise to do it alone, and the market for rolling stock is too small (despite Buy America provisions!) to be sustainable.

I suspect we're seeing a widespread adoption of BRT in America not just because BRT is good (and it is) but also because it fits within our existing technical/industrial complex of building highway lanes and then running automobiles on them. 

On the efficiency of transit

"Transit is the most space efficient mode, and thus it should be rewarded with dedicated ROW rather than tossed into low-efficiency auto traffic" - Warren G. Wells

I hate to be the naysayer, but that's kind of irrelevant. In terms of moving people, what matters isn't space efficiency, but time-efficiency. Transit moves a lot of people per vehicle, but not a lot of people per lane. For urban traffic, the main capacity limitation are at intersections. But even there, for a dedicated transit line to be  more space-efficient than an automobile, you basically have to have 90 people on the bus, and a bus coming every 5 minutes (which is pretty high quality BRT).

The space-efficiency of transit simply isn't relevant from a transportation efficiency perspective. But the advantage of transit is enormous in terms of space efficiency, simply due to parking**. Each parking spot requires between 250-400 SF, and each car requires about 8 parking spots. So every person on the bus saves about 2500 SF of space. 10 people on bus saves half an acre of parking. 2000 people by bus saves 100 acres of parking. 

So when we talk about the efficiencies of transit, we're really talking about the space efficiency of urban land. (For pre-war transit, supplying transit transformed rural land into urban land, with the concomitant increase in rents. We need to forget about that--it was tied to a specific non-recurring historic context). For modern transit, transit in the 'light rail' era, the purpose of transit is to reduce parking demand, not transportation demand. (Transit reduces transportation demand only by forcing people to accept a crappier version of transportation, reducing their consumption of it, ie- people drinking eating fewer vegetables because the only ones they can get are rotten). 

So if we're planning fixed guide-way transit, it's all about the parking garages. Because that shows two things: a) there is a lot of transportation demand there, and the costs associated with providing parking are already high, and b) there is some (agency, corporation, muni) with the capacity and need for capital intensive transportation infrastructure. Those are where the stations need to go. Other places will get transit service, but only by virtue of being on the way.

Why b) is important: If transit efficiency is all about reducing parking demand. As a society, we've more or less made the decision that capacity improvements benefit everyone (they don't), so we're ok with government provision of roads. But we're much charier of provision of parking, because we associate parking with private land uses (never mind that it's hand-in-glove with automobility). So when we start providing rapid transit, we're really reducing parking demand at a handful of places. And those places tend to be: colleges, hospital, and civic centers. Because those are the places we've perceive as being part of the 'public' realm, and local/regional voters are willing to help those, in a civic-sense. State buildings/campuses often fall under the same penumbra, as do Federal buildings--the Feds provide half of the capital funding for new transit, and they understand the financial value of reduced parking demand.

#----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*A bus without dedicated guide way isn't BRT, regardless of FTA's bullshit terminology. 

**Traffic engineers don't care about parking. They aren't trained for it. They only care insofar: a) access to and from it doesn't disrupt roadway capacity, and b) there is enough of it that cars don't back up onto the roads. 

Against Light Rail

Don't have a rail corridor handy? Don't build light rail. By the time congestion is bad enough for a metropolis to think about light rail, land costs are too high for any 'greenfield' corridor, and using existing right of way is the only feasible way. 

If the only existing right of way is public street, why spend the money to build a electrified railway? Electrified traction has undeniable perks over rubber-tired buses (fuel costs, acceleration, comfort), but the cost is rarely worth the marginal benefit.  

Neither ride comfort nor transit signal priority (TSP) nor dedicated/reserved guideway are specific to rail. Nor level boarding or off-board fare collection. With double-articulated buses, the rider capacity/driver ratio rail previously offered over bus has largely evaporated. 

So why do places like Portland keep building light rail? I suggest an availability heuristic: They have lots of old freight rail lines to convert to light rail. I seen symptoms of the same disease in Utah, and efforts to bring light rail to Utah County. 

The only actual advantage of rail over bus is political: its easier for a metro to create rail rapid transit than bus rapid transit. In the public imagination, light rail vehicles are like freight trains, whose necessary separation from cars is implicitly accepted. 

It is the separation from cars that the true virtues of rapid transit emerge - speed, safety and reliability. Rapid transit requires exclusive/dedicated guide way--exceptions generate accidents reliably, whether in travel lanes or turning lanes.  

So it's politically feasible for a light rail to claim a lane a lane on a congested arterial in a way no mere bus could ever attempt. That said, double-articulated buses seem to be able to make some of the same claims to exceptionalism and necessary special accommodations.  

Taking houses for BRT

Couple of years back, I worked on the Ogden BRT project. Trying to get the WSU Dee event center was a pain, and a co-worker and I finally suggested that taking a house was necessary.

That iteration of the study didn't pan out, but I guess we broke some sort of dam, because the next study suggested taking 3 houses.

Rule of transit: Be on the way
Rule 2: Don't be IN the way.

The political deviance of BRT

I love looking at transit plans. And I love looking at good maps. WFRC's website satisfies about 75% of them.

But today, I need to call out an egregious failure:

This is a planned BRT, stretching from downtown Salt Lake to Sandy, a large suburb some 15 miles south. East from the FrontRunner station in Salt Lake, South along 700/900 east, and West on 9400 South, and then on 102nd south to Frontrunner. Except for this  weird little jog.

I know why--there is a relatively dense residential cluster at the 106th South Trax Station. But there is also a Trax station at 9400 South. Connecting the two Trax stations by BRT makes no sense. Connecting the (low-rise) residential makes no sense. Why not just continue west on 94th, and south along Sandy Expo Parkway? Or South along States Street to 102nd South? This routing adds miles and minutes to a BRT route...and for what?

There must be some political schenanigans going on.

Incremental Investment

Bus, express bus, BRT-lite and BRT can all be considered steps in a progression of incremental investment in transit routes, gradually increasing the speed, comfort, and reliability, moving it toward a Rapid Transit standard. Because most of these investments are in operations (greater frequency, extended hours) they are reversible. In contrast, fixed-guideway transit investments such as those funded by the FTA typically represent a complete package of Rapid Transit elements, all at once: Dedicated guideway, signal priority, substantial stations to speed boarding, wider stop spacing, higher frequency and longer operating hours. They also come with a required guarantee of minimum service standards, to ensure that expensive capital investments are properly used. Because all of the improvements happen once, simultaneously, rather than incrementally, fixed-guideway rapid transit projects are perceived as development catalysts, capable of inducing development and revitalizing nearby areas. Streetcars represent the apogee of such a catalyst: providing a sudden increase in property values in a limited area, potentially spurring new, denser development.

Feasibly, in combination with appropriate revisions to zoning and parking requirements, a new light rail line could result in substantial additional multi-family development. Multifamily development is characterized by lower car ownership, and higher density residential is associated with great transit use (more people nearby the transit station generates more riders). The influx of residential population could then trigger a surge in demand for nearby retail and services, leading to the re-use or redevelopment of older buildings nearby. Following the exhaustion of available space nearby, the oldest and most-run down buildings will be torn down and replaced by new development. At sufficiently high densities, the combination of residential density generates sufficient street-life to represent an attractive walkable urban center, which attracts further residential develop, and additional retail and services.  Walkable mixed-use districts are generally considered to be highly attractive to both college-age populations and college educated professionals, and makes it possible for the region to compete to attract such populations. 

In contrast, incremental development will generate an incremental response: there will be no sudden upsurge in property values, the process of re-use, rehabilitation and redevelopment will be spread out over more years, and new development generated will be at a lower intensity. Incremental investment will never make the nearby area a ‘hot’ neighborhood. Correspondingly, the feedback loop of benefits to the area will be slower, the annual return on capital lower, and the whole area less attractive to developers. 

Fixed guideway rapid transit systems also offer an opportunity to attract ‘choice’ riders to the system, who elect to ride transit out of choice, rather than lack of alternatives. A fully implemented rapid transit route is exponentially better than it’s non-rapid equivalent due to the synergy between the elements: frequency and longer operating hours. Vehicles move faster and spend less time stopped, making is possible to provide the same amount of transit service with fewer vehicles. The combination of high frequency and dedicated guideway improve the reliability of the transit route. But the improved reliability of a central rapid transit ‘spine’ makes a transfer-based transit network feasible. It becomes possible to transition from a ‘hub-and-spoke’ based network toward a ‘fishbone’ arrangement of a rapid transit spine and bus ‘ribs’. Transfer-based transit networks are more efficient than centralized hub and spoke arrangements 

Hey FTA~

Maybe the FTA should start mandating a minimum service threshold for the corridors it funds....with some sort of 'snapback' that requires immediate repayment if service falls below that threshold.

"The system is planned for half-hourly service once additional trains arrive, yet the project is indicative of a problem among many major transit projects in the U.S.: we’re willing to spend billions of dollars on construction, but we have less interest in paying the long-term costs of making sure trains and buses on these lines are frequent and reliable".

And maybe would should be learning from places in Europe, and start following a 'design-build-operate' model for our major transit investments. Because otherwise, when the snapback hits, transit agencies will simply cut bus service to offset the costs, and total ridership will actually be less.

Which begs the question: Why are we building all this rail? I'm a transit advocate, I ride every train I get a chance to (Atlanta's streetcar stinks, by the way), and I still wonder. When I advocated for rail  vs BRT (close to a decade ago) it was on the premise that rail could spur Transit-Oriented-Development. The reality check is that most rail spurs very little TOD, either. Mostly, it spurs park and rides. Only in a few select locations (downtown adjacent) do I ever see any TOD. And those locations are within streetcar range. So why build all the rail to suburbia? If all we're going to get is parking lots, why not build BRT? The academic research is pretty clear that it does no worse that rail at generating TOD.

I hate to say it, but rail (especially expensive rail) only makes sense for places that already have rail, either in the form of a network, or in the form of leftover freight rail. So that more rail either prevents a 'change of gauge' problem for riders (where they have to change vehicles), or makes duplicate use of rail track.

But I suppose that's the logic the New Starts program was designed to overcome: To provide a 'starter' rail system for places that didn't have rail, so they had a seed to grow from. Retrospectively (post Curitiba) it looks a little silly.

But as I reflect on it, there is another reason for rail: Guideway. When it's not just 'right of way', but actual guide-way. When you've got a vehicle moving through a tunnel, or on an elevated platform, when straying from the path would mean disaster.

Honolulu rail system

In 1966, then-mayor Neal S. Blaisdell suggested a rail line as a solution to alleviate traffic problems in Honolulu, stating,

 "Taken in the mass, the automobile is a noxious mechanism whose destiny in workaday urban use is to frustrate man and make dead certain that he approaches his daily occupation unhappy and inefficient."^[20]

The failure of Honolulu to get their act together is staggering. It's an island. It has to import cars by air, and fuel by ship. All the urban development is constrained to a tiny strip along. The lack of a mass-transit system is quite puzzling. Takes a bit of reading to get to the core of it, but looks like the cause is political: it's a contest for space between mass transit and cars. (No surprise there--it's a fundamental conflict in urban transportation). And BRT doesn't seem to have entered the conversation until recently; prior to effective BRT, 'rapid' transit meant rail.

Should Honolulu have rail? Probably not. Circa 2000, rail probably looked reasonable. But that was before Curitiba pioneered BRT, and demonstrated that heavy-rail levels of capacity were possible using rubber-tracked vehicles with internal combustion engines.

Technically speaking, there are only two cases where rail transit is justified:

1. You already have a rail transit system, and you are building an additional corridor that will interconnect with it, and building more rail will eliminate the 'change of gauge' problem that continuing along a corridor would otherwise require a transfer to another vehicle.
2. A railroad line/corridor/ROW already exists and can be re-used/repurposed.  

Looking at the proposed rail line, looks like Honolulu meets neither of these criteria.  So why rail? Cars.  As I mentioned  previously, it's a fight for urban space, a fight for travel right-of-way. It proved politically easier to spend billions to build a curious heavy rail/commuter rail/light rail hybrid, rather than take roadway right-of-way from cars. (Choosing between pain today or pain tomorrow, and the public will always take pain tomorrow--something politicians endlessly exploit).  

If you can't make use of the surface right-of-way (which has been politically allocated to cars), then you have to use separated guidway--either elevated or underground. My understanding is that as a volcanic island, there is no 'digging' to be done on Honolulu: building anything underground means dynamiting through igneous rocks of various types. And elevated is cheaper than underground, regardless. (Digging through air is pretty cheap, I understand). So after the political decision to allocate all the surface space to cars was made, elevated was the only place to stick a train. But elevating a train isn't cheap: It's like building a highway consisting solely of bridges. And so the cost is in the billions. And so the project is politically tendentious. Complicating this, Hawaii has zero experience building rapid transit of any sort. 

Sadly, this is a common problem across America: we've not built grade separated transit in decades, and hence there is no professional experience in doing it. All the experience is European and Chinese. And yet the 'benevolent' requirements of 'Buy American' provisions for the FTA condemns U.S. rapid transit to autarky. Rather than import (and localize) foreign expertise, we have to 're-invent the wheel', making all the same dumb mistakes. 

Why? Because this is America, and we don't have a national rail agency. It's a federal system: the Feds fund it, but the local agency builds it. And to do that, every local agency has to learn how to do it. Which is impossible, and so most local agencies rely on consultants to provide the expertise.

And as a consultant, I can tell you, there is a strong incentive to over-state your expertise, 'stretch' related qualifications, and magnify that aspect of related projects. Because that's how you win work, and if you don't win work, you don't eat. And that includes practices like underbidding the work (saying you can do it in less time/for less money than the task will actually take). When public projects go sideways, the reasons for it are predictable. 

wiki on BRT:

As this will probably fall afoul of wikipedia's ban on primary research, thought it was worth repeating:

When TransMilenio opened in 2000, it changed the paradigm by giving buses a passing lane at each station stop and introducing express services within the BRT infrastructure. These innovations increased the maximum achieved capacity of a BRT system to 35,000 passengers per hour.^[44] Light rail, by comparison, has reported passenger capacities between 3,500pph (mainly street running) to 19,000pph (fully Grade-separated). "From these findings … there is little evidence to support the view that [light rail] can carry more than busways.".^[45] There are conditions that favor light over BRT, but they are fairly narrow. To meet these conditions you would need a corridor with only one available lane in each direction, more than 16,000 passengers per direction per hour but less than 20,000, and a long block length, because the train cannot block intersections. These conditions are rare, but in that specific instance, light rail would have a significant operational advantage. However, "... any perceived advantages of [light rail] over BRT are primarily aesthetic and political rather than technical … due to the perceived capacity constraint of BRT there are currently no cases in the US where [light rail] should be favored over BRT."^[46]

 44) W. Hook, S. Lotshaw and A. Weinstock (2013). "More Development For Your Transit Dollar. An Analysis of 21 North American Transit Corridors" (PDF). Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. p. 20.

 46) W. Hook, S. Lotshaw and A. Weinstock (2013). "More Development For Your Transit Dollar. An Analysis of 21 North American Transit Corridors" (PDF). Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. p. 21.

Charlotte Transit

Sometimes I wonder if I should just become the 'BRT guy'. Lots of competition to be the 'TOD guy', (most notably Calthorpe and DPZ).

From my NITC Charlotte BRT Report:

This study examines Charlotte’s bus rapid transit line. More properly, the project is an ‘open busway’ without inline stations, served by a two-way exclusive bus-only lanes in the center Figure 1: Example corridor, buffers, and LED census block points of Independence Avenue. While Charlotte has a number of experiments with best bus and bus plus systems, such as Sprinter bus and the Gold Rush Trolleybus, both fail the critical test of a Bus Rapid Transit System: Dedicated guide-way. Charlotte’s bus rapid transit makes use of underused HOV lanes the center of Independence Boulevard. In addition, it enjoys the use of queue jumpers at certain intersections. The 2-way HOV lanes provide 2.6 miles of dedicated right of way. The right of way is typically used by express buses. Buses traveling the corridor originate in the southeast corner of the metropolis, and ends slightly inside the I-485 beltway. 

Charlotte also has LRT

This study examines Charlotte’s light rail line, the LYNX. It is a 9.6-mile light rail corridor that began service on Figure 1: Example corridor, buffers, and LED census block points. The corridor chosen for analysis was part of the South Rail Line. For a Comparable corridor, the planned Blue Line/North East extension along the existing railroad to UNC Charlotte was used. Both corridors are existing rail right-of-ways running through the central business district (CBD). Figure 2 shows the transit and comparable corridors as well as the location of LED points.

The Owl Line

I've written previously about an 'Owl' line for TRAX, running from the Airport to the Univerisity Hospital.(Map)

Today, I read a Tribune Editorial which said:

Honestly, to justify the more expensive station, we may eventually to have to throw in even more money. Specifically, the trains need to start earlier and run later to catch more airport employees and travelers. (Current ridership to the airport is about 1,100 per day.) 

UTA can't run TRAX any later due the deal they cut with Union Pacific regarding use of the rail-road tracks TRAX runs on, viz: UP gets to run freight on the tracks after midnight. But it's only on the part of the Blue line south of about 1100 South.  So an 'Owl' line, running up to and after midnight, could be run on the street-running portions of TRAX. The termini on each end (the airport and the hospital) are both 24 hour destinations. However, the majority of the ridership for both of those destinations are going to come from employees, and TRAX doesn't connect to the lower income neighborhoods where orderlies and baggage handlers make their homes. (There is a reason that the Green line connects to West Valley). Given that we can't make that connection by TRAX, it will have to be by bus. Given the distances, it should likely be BRT-like (ie MAX). Currently on the planning books are two N-S corridors, 5600 W. and State Street. Operating those two routes on longer hours, in combination with the Owl line, would provide access to 24-hour employment at a large number of destinations. Running through SLC downtown, it would also serve the cleaners/janitors, and may, just maybe, the bar-going crowd...

Boulder Mountain Highway for Tooele

More and more I am hearing about people commuting from Tooele to downtown SLC and the University of Utah. Housing in Tooele is cheap, because the accessibility to jobs is poor. But transport costs are high, as people are driving long distances. Those long distances are being driven by older cars. (As lower-income HH can't afford new cars). That generates a lot of air pollution.

To me, this calls for an Express Bus from Strasbury to the University of Utah, stopping by downtown along the way. (Perhaps at the State and 200 S. Bus Hub...). Nevada has one from an outlying community to the strip, that is well liked. It costs $5 to ride, but that's comparable to the cost of gas for the trip. (Gas was more expensive, then). Still, 25 miles at 25 miles/gallon is a gallon of gas each way. @ about $2.40/gallon, gas alone would not do it.

Surveys and empirical evidence suggest that most people spend 15% of their budget on transport. (Transit dependent populations spend less, something in the neighborhood of 4%, because it's hard to spend that much money on transit. A ticket is a ticket. Two tickets a day or 4 tickets a day is the near-max*).

Do rider-collection near freeways, using a Park and Ride lot, and then the bus--call it an 'Inter-Urban', as it provides access between towns, rather than within them--takes people to SLC CBD and the University.

UTA likely already has something like this, but it's likely sub-optimal. More capital investment would make it better, but 'flexibility' is assumed to be a necessary virtue of all buses; being unable to change a route at the drop of a hat seems terrible. (Nevermind that same flaw is considered a virtue for trains).

*Makes me wonder if there isn't a market for premium transit, costing slightly more than the regular transit, and offering slightly better service. Or double the price for 150% of service (2/3 the travel time).

BRT vs. Traffic Lane, Part 3

Continuing our series on BRT vs. Traffic Lane (Part 1, Part 2), another exploration how how the two compare. Mike Brown observed that:

1. A 5-minute, fully loaded BRT would carry about as many people as a standard Arterial lane
2. Unless you can trust that you can fully load each bus for an hour, then a 5-minute BRT will not move as many people as standard cars would.
3. That's not necessarily a reason to go with cars.  Cars create car dependency, and they max out in what they can carry, but BRT can be increased to more than 5-minutes.
4. "BRT" need not be a single route. In many downtowns, some block segments have a bus each minute, and sometimes more often.  
5. Dedicating a lane exclusively to buses in these cases will result in more people per lane, assuming most buses are quite full.
6. If automated vehicles and vehicle sharing begin to overtake private ownership, it is possible to imagine lanes where auto occupancy might reach 4 or more passengers carried in "minivan"-type vehicles.  In this "jitney-like" transit scenario, lanes even outside downtowns can start to carry far higher numbers than 5-minute suburban BRT," which is very aggressive service for suburbs.

Mike came up with the following numbers:

I'll add a few comments to what Mike has said.

1) I don't think it's physically possible to run 60 buses an hour, even dedicated bus pullouts. That would require a bus to decelerate, board, rejoin traffic, and accelerate. Even with elevated platforms, off-board fare collection and multi-door boarding, I think that would be a hard standard to achieve. And even one late bus would make all the buses in the queue later, and congestion would ripple down the line.

 The really serious BRT routes (Gold Standard) have four lanes: A curbside lane (to reduce time spent re-entering the travel lane) used for boarding, and a bypass lane. This seems to permit operations at headways as low as a minute and a half. But that would be four lanes, and outside our scope of analysis. Hit with capacity constraints, the current solution is to make a bus more train-like, but adding another unit, using double-articulated buses rather than just articulated buses. Double-articulated buses with capacities up to 180 are currently in use in Utrecht. Volvo has a 300 person capacity bus that is being tested on the TransMilenio.

2) Rare is a system that could load such a bus so heavily. But it might be possible. Daily ridership on route 830 (the route that the Provo-Orem BRT is to replace) reached 3,000 per day. The BRT was projected (in 2011) to have 12,900 daily riders. Assuming 10% of ridership takes place in the hour of the morning peak., that's 1,290 riders. Assuming the planned five minute headway is used, that's about 107 riders per bus. Or course, they won't all be on the bus at the same time. But it does suggest that the Provo-Orem BRT will be pretty heavily used. In 2030, the BRT is projected to have 16,100 daily riders, or about 137 riders per bus. Again, they won't all be on the bus at the same time.

3) BRT does scale better. Moving to a double-articulated bus would boost capacity to 120. At five minute headway, such a bus could carry 1400 persons per direction per hour , greater than a major arterial at 5pm. Alternately, just adding 3 more buses (to boost headway to once every 4 minutes an hour) increases it to 1400 persons per direction per hour. A bus every four minutes seems like something a single lane could manage. TRAX puts a train through an intersection every 5 minutes regularly (400 S. and Main). On 'crush load' (game) days, it might be as high as double that.

4) Branded Bus Corridors are a great idea. But they are only as long as the 'rainbow' portion of the corridor, where multiple lines overlap. Beyond that, you have to transfer. TRAX is a 'rainbow' corridor from 2100 South to Courthouse station. For trains with limited amounts of guideway, service laps are almost inevitable. But for buses, I'm not sure about inter-lining services: Does it just add more confusion? I think it only really works when buses are converging on a termini. I don't see it on the Salt Lake County or Utah County map, but you can see where one should be branded on the downtown Salt Lake Map: State Street from 5th South to North Temple, and thence west along North Temple to 300 West. All of North Temple could be branded, and both 200 South and 400 South might also be candidates.

5) The key question is not "Will the buses be full?" but "When will the pavement carry more people as a bus lane than as an automobile lane, during the peak hour." Not at five minute headway and 90 person loads, but at 100 persons/bus (at 5 minute headway) or 80 persons per bus (4 minute headway), a bus edges ahead. Based on the 2030 numbers, it seems likely that a BRT is a better long-term investment than a traffic lane.

6) A full discussion on automated vehicles is going to require a full blog post.

TRAX is about done in Salt Lake County

The more I look at it, the more I think that TRAX is done in Salt Lake County*. Barring an odd stretch of the Denver and Rio Grand Western Railroad, I don't think there is any unused railroad track left in Salt Lake County**.  Almost all of what which existed in years past has been removed or converted to roadway. And that means converting roadway to dedicated right of way, at which point you might as well built a BRT.

There are a few cases where light rail might be appropriate: 

• Granary TRAX along 400 W/700 South. Only a mile long, and reduces congestion on the 400 South and Main Street intersection.
• Salt Lake International Airport. Airports need circulators, and it might as well be TRAX.
• S-line to Westminster. (Maybe) Again, about a mile long. 
• 400 South to connect the Red Line to FrontRunner direct. This has been part of the long range transportation plan for a decade, without happening. 200 south is increasingly play the role of connection FrontRunner to the University, making this irrelevant. 
• Misc. streetcar, but anyplace they add a 'tram' portion (dedicated/shared guideway) to TRAX is going to have to be short, or else it will be so slow that no one will use it.
• Streetcar from Westminster to 900 East. It would connect two rail lines, and links the University to Sugarhouse.
• 9 Line SC, from 900S/400W to Indiana Ave/Redwood Road. TRAX on one end, BRT at other terminus. 2 miles long.
• The extension from Draper to the Utah County line is planned, but being put off until Utah County matures enough to support TRAX. I admit a certain amount of skepticism this will happen. 
• Red line extension to Herriman/Draper Town Centers. A bit noodely, but greenfield development without an existing roadway, so reasonable. 
• Draper FrontRunner to LRTP Highland Drive/Minutemand Drive TRAX stop. Connects two rail modes, uses the 'grayfield' of the Prison site for exclusive right of way, and makes it possible to get across I-15 by rail. Bonus points in they add a ped bridge.
• Any freeway median. BRT would be cheaper, LRT might be better. 

Not appropriate 

• Fashionplace TRAX to the U, via I-215 and Foothill. Better as BRT. 
• Sugarhouse to Parley's Transit Center. Via roadway, so better as BRT.
• Highland Drive from end of Blue Line to 1100 East in SLC. Better as BRT. 
• Daybreak-to-Draper along 114th South. Better as BRT.
• 'Cottonwood Coaster' from Historic Sandy TRAX to Cottonwood Transit Center. Better as BRT. 
• Draper Town Center to nowhere(?), along 123rd. No rail terminus, no connection to TRAX or Frontrunner on the east end.  I understand the desire to connect this end of the Red line extension to the rest of the valley, but TRAX is not the way to do it. 
• I specifically disdain the DGRW Garfield Branch between Magna and the Old Bingham Highway. No major uses connected, and substantial out of direction travel. 
• DGRW Branch from Old Bingham, to 5600 West, North to Amelia Earhart Drive and thence to the airport. The 5600 West portion is better as BRT, and connecting to the airport would require constructing substantial track is an area already full of ramps. Converting the rest of 40th West to freeway standards provides better airport access.  A BRT from the airport to the business park and thence south on 5600 South is likely just a better alternative. Converting the DGRW branch from railway to exclusive BRT would be better than TRAX.

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*I know it's still in the running for Mountain Accord in Little Cottonwood; but so are a BRT and a cable car system. I laughed at the idea of a cable car, but if the ski resorts want to fund one over Guardsman Pass, it's their money.

**The extension from Draper to the Utah County line is planned, but being put off until Utah County matures enough to support TRAX. I admit a certain amount of skepticism this will happen.

LRT vs. BRT

To built more Rapid Transit, it should be BRT rather than LRT. Bus Rapid Transit is simply cheaper per mile, which means more of it for the same price.

LRT's advantages are as much political as technical.

First: LRT's primary advantage is that it can use rail corridors to achieve rapid transit status. Cars can't use railway right of way, so there is no competition with cars. This advantage is not limited to LRT. As both the BRT tunnels in Pittsburgh and the Orange line in LA have shown, BRT can use railway right of way quite well. Buses, driven by professionally trained drivers, can pass each easily in 22' (11' per bus). I recall the buses in Eugene, Oregon, coming scarily close. (Railway right of way is only ~22' wide at different points, which is too narrow for even two lanes of car traffic 10' lane + 10' lane + 8' safety area + 8' safety area). Word on the street is that international Fire Code mandates 26' of clear space as necessary for emergency operations.

Second, LRT vehicles are heavier, so they stop more slowly, which makes sharing a lane with cars much more dangerous, especially at high speeds, and consequently less likely to happen.A train in a highway median gets to keep its separated guide-way, and no crank(y) politician can change that. BRT 'Freeway Flyers' (BRT in an exclusive freeway lane) inevitably become BRT in a HOT lane, with consequent degradation in speed and reliability. Trains don't have the problem.

There may be one area where LRT has an actual advantage: Elevated track, with very right clearances. There have been experiments with 'guided' BRT, using things like optical sensors, guidewheels, or specially constructed guide-track. 'The Gap' between vehicle and platform can be an issue, and I'm not sure how well BRT does in that regard.

However, a 'train' portion (exclusive/separated) guideway is expensive. Denver, Seattle, and LA all achieved it by putting light rail in freeway medians. LA is increasing achieving it through the use of elevated lines (albeit at very high prices). Seattle has tunneled, at a cost of over a hundred million dollars a mile.

Previously, I've talked only about 'Rapid' transit in separated/exclusive guide-way. If we want to talk streetcars, it's only fair to compare them with their wheel counterpart, buses. The advantage of streetcar is (again) political. Chambers of Commerce like streetcars, due to their permanency. They are also cheaper and less politically fraught. A 'tram'-type light rail (AKA street-car) is cheap, because it runs in dedicated/mixed traffic right of way. So there is no need to take right of way from cars, or eliminate parking. But this type of right of way comes with costs. It makes the service slow and unreliable--it's like a bus on steel wheels.

Streetcars are also (politically) easier to build, because the FTA helps pay for them. Streetcars can get 50% FTA funding for capital expenses, such as vehicles, TSP, and station platforms. There is no reason a bus couldn't enjoy these same benefits.

The essence of BRT is dedicated guideway. BRT stands for Bus Rapid Transit. 'Rapid' is a technical jargon for exclusive right of way.

A BRT that shares right of way with cars is just a bus. Be it double-articulated, double-storied, multi-door boarding, off-board fare collection, significant stations, with 5-minute frequency. It may be a very nice bus. The FTA can call it 'BRT-lite'. Nonsense. Not BRT.

Contrast with Real rapid transit:
'Metro': Grade separated crossings, underground or elevated track (both exclusive).
'Pre-Metro': Grade-separated crossings, exclusive track
Light Rail Train: Time-separated crossings (railroad gates), exclusive track.
Light Rail Tram-Train: Time-separated crossings (intersections), exclusive track.

Nor Rapid Transit:
Light Rail Tram (Streetcar): Time-separated crossings (intersections) dedicated or shared right of way.

Getting away from 'dedicated' right of way, and obtaining exclusive right of way is hard. Demand for right of way for automobiles is constant, and most severe at intersections. The UTA Trax shares left-turn pockets with automobiles, to it's detriment, and to serious detriment of safety. And rare is the 'BRT' that doesn't have a side-running section where it sits behind right-turning cars.

Read the ITDP BRT Standard. When someone tries to sell you BRT, ask what 'grade' you are getting.

BRT vs. Traffic Lane 2

A traffic engineer friend of mine was good enough to point out some issues with my earlier post. 

One flaw in your math is that 1900 is not what arterial streets carry.  That is the “ideal saturation flow rate” which means if there were green lights all the time and no other interference, you’d probably measure 1900.  From there you apply reduction factors. The biggest factor is the green-time factor, which may be .6 on arterials, and .35 or so for collectors.  So .6*1900 = 1100.  But in truth, a road like the Provo BRT corridor will be closer to 750 or 800 vphpl.  Then you have the occupancy factor, which at peak times might be 1.3 or 1.4.  So say 800*1.4 = 1100 people/hr/lane, if carried in cars.

Taking this into account, I'll set forth another set of scenarios:

First set is a full BRT with 90 person on it. This is a bit flattering to BRT, because it assumes that the BRT is 'full' all the time.  It was a simplifying assumption. But the ideal BRT would move more people than the ideal traffic lane. (2439 vs. 1596).

But if we make that more realistic, and assume that the bus is half full during the peak hour (perhaps generous, but plausible), the numbers are much less flattering to BRT. Even at max buses/hour, it moves about as many as an actual travel lane (1215 vs. 1330/1064). However, during rush hour, 30 buses/hour compares favorably: 1215 vs. 1045/836. Hence, during rush hour, a BRT simply carries more persons than any traffic lane, even at 50% full.

 However, dropping the number of buses per hour significantly undermines that advantage. As 5 minute headway (12 buses/hour), a half-full BRT only has a capacity of 486, less than half of that for traffic lane, even during rush hour. Each bus would need to be full (90 people) during rush hour, to equal the capacity of a traffic lane. 

For automobile travel, passengers per vehicle is the real wild-card. As the chart shows, an HOV lane, even minimally loaded (2 persons) at its worse (1520) carries more persons than all the BRT systems except the full loaded BRT at 3 or 4 minute headways. 

This suggests a system of on-arterial HOV lanes would be a more effective strategy than BRT. But that will be the topic for a later post. 

BRT vs. Traffic Lane

Back of the envelope calculation here:

For a BRT:

Assuming an articulated bus is purchased, passenger capacity per bus can be estimated at 90 passengers for an articulated New Flyer vehicle[2], or 108 for an Xcelsior vehicle. With 5 minute peak headways, this equates to 12 buses per hour per direction, or 24 buses/hour total. With a potential of 90 passengers per bus, the Provo-Orem BRT would have a capacity of (90*60/5*2) is 1080 passengers per direction per hour. For the Xcelsior, the Provo-Orem BRT would have a capacity of (108*60/5*2) is 1296 passengers per direction per hour. The IRIS Civic Bus, used for the Las Vegas MAX, has a capacity of 120 persons; peak hour capacity in which case would be 1440 passengers per direction per hour.  

So how does that compare to a highway? 

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Max capacity per lane for automobiles is 1900 per hour, says "Mike on Traffic'. Table 31 of the "Default Values for Highway Capacity and Level of Service Analyses" suggests this is a reasonable number.

So the BRT (at max capacity) is less than that for freeway lane. Damning, eh? Not quite. That's BRT capacity at 5 minute headways, or 12 buses per hour. BRT is suggested to cap out at 17,000 per hour.

But I'm skeptical. How good a source is Marin? Assuming 17,000 is both directions, with a capacity of 120 per bus, that's 71 buses per hour. That's a bus every 50 seconds. That strikes me as unrealistic.

Ontario suggests a somewhat lower number, more like 5k (bus in bus lane), in one hour, in one direction. So that's more like 10,000 in both directions, rather than 17,000. 5,000 passengers per hour at 120 passengers per hour is about 42 buses per hour, which is a bus about every minute and 45 seconds. That seems more feasible.

But we are talking about Provo here, so let's ignore the 'theoretical max' and talk about the specifics. Assume the midpoint (the Xcelsior at 108 passengers) rather than the CivicBus at 120.

For the Xcelsior, the Provo-Orem BRT would have a capacity of (108*60/5) is 1296 passengers per direction per hour. If we increase that to a bus every 4 minutes, we get 15 buses per hour, with a max capacity of 1620 persons per direction per hour (peak capacity). Following that logic, we can generate the following chart:

Headway------- Buses per hour-----------Capacity

        5 min                     12                              1296

        4 min                     15                              1620

       3:30 min                 17                              1836

       3:20 min                 18                              1944

        3 min                     20                              2160

        2 min                     30                              3240

So a BRT carries about the same at 17-18 buses per hour. 

Does that mean we shouldn't build BRT when the capacity would be lower? 

No. 

It means that BRT scales better than a general traffic lane. From the examples above, it's pretty clear that a bus every two minutes is feasible. Which means that a dedicated lane of BRT has a capacity of over 3000 persons per direction per hour, or about half again what a general traffic lane is.

Now, the really big, really nice BRT systems don't just have one BRT lane: They have two. Some have four (for local and express). Those are the places that really have a 'surface subway'. The capacity that arrangement provides must be huge. 

Light Rail

Wikipedia says LRT has a capacity of 220 per car. Assuming the calculations above apply, that gives us something like: 

Headway------- Traincars per hour-----------Capacity

       20 min                     3                                660  

       15 min                     4                                880

        5 min                     12                              2640

(I have serious doubts of UTA's ability to run a train more than once every 5 minutes...the system just is not designed for it)

But that's with only a single car per train. If they couple cars into trainsets (and SLC's long blocks permit up to four cars per trainset), the max theoretical capacity is quadrupled. 

Headway------- Traincars per hour-----------Capacity

       20 min                     3                                2640  

       15 min                     4                                3520

        5 min                     12                              10,560

Those are crazy numbers. That means on game days at the U (when every train is packed, and UTA is running trains every 5 minutes) TRAX is carrying about 5.5 freeway lanes worth of people.

Can you imagine the mess on I-15 without it?

[1] http://www.metro-magazine.com/bus/news/719169/utah-transit-to-add-35-more-60-foot-new-flyer-xcelsiors

[2] https://www.nbrti.org/docs/pdf/EmX_%20Evaluation_09_508.pdf