Trains are awesome!
And we should build them in every city in America, right?
Chicago
D.C.
London
Unless you live in a big "hero" city that has trains,
you are probably a dude who drives
because nobody wants to be a dud who is stuck riding the bus!
(Perk:) There's always been historically a perception
that trains are cool and buses are dirty and stinky and slow.
A train station is like a binding contract.
A smooth, speedy, spotless train will arrive.
A bus stop is a flimsy roadside attraction.
(DeLaMare-Schaefer:) When you're taking a bus, it's someplace on the side of the
road. And you're not quite sure. Is somebody really going to come take care of me here?
Imagine a world where Memphis had a subway
Albuquerque had an el-train
and Columbus, Georgia Lubbock, Texas and
Wichita, Kansas all had light rail.
And there's one reason why they don't:
Trains are stupid expensive!
New rail transit lines cost over $100-million dollars per mile.
And if it's a subway, it can cost close to a billion dollars a mile or more.
(Clip, CA Gov Newsom:) "The biggest mistake
we make is we knowingly underestimate the cost of these projects up front."
Versus the city bus which gets to use the public roads for free.
And that's why we suburbanites are stuck with them.
Don't we deserve real transit?
Something huge, like this project I watched my city build while i was in grad school.
Okay, so there's the old traffic pole. All the way over there's the new one.
That's a big change to widen it that much.
Which pre-pandemic had 10,000 boardings per day—
which is kind of crazy because it's all on a bus!
A bus?
(DeLaMare-Schaefer:)
We had a bus that ran this route it had about 1,800 to 2,000 boardings per day.
In April 2019, we were at about 9,800 average weekday boardings.
I'm talking with Mary DeLaMar Schaefer. Her agency recently opened a long-awaited transit line.
Utah County, Utah wanted to connect its two commuter rail stations with two universities.
(DeLaMare-Schaefer:) So the Utah Valley Express
is a wonderful service. We have 18 different platforms. It has built structures,
just like light rail. So you know the bus is going to come there.
(DeLaMare-Schaefer:) During our peak hours in the morning in the afternoon it's every
six minutes. During the day it's every 10 minutes. If you ride Utah Valley Express,
you're probably not gonna ever look at a schedule. You're gonna just hop on the next bus.
This train-like frequency lets operators break the old bus driver creed:
Try not to be late
But never ever pull away from a bus stop early!
(DeLaMare-Schaefer:) You have to change your thinking as a bus operator, mostly to think about
pacing. It's like a train. Rather than stopping and waiting for your hold point.
The goal is to make the Utah Valley Express, light rail on tires.
(DeLaMare-Schaefer:) I've ridden with students from Utah Valley University. Right in the middle
of the day, I like what are you doing, they're like, well I'm gonna go home for lunch. Because
the bus comes so often that i can go home, have lunch, hop back on, get back to the university.
As good as it is, it is still a bus.
It's a lot bumpier than a light rail train because you're going over asphalt.
If money was no issue, this community would have built light rail. But Utah County,
Utah is kind of small. And the people there are very very very frugal.
(DeLaMare-Schaefer:) This was a $200-million dollar project.
So that's nothing small. And it's one-third the cost of what it costs to put rails in.
(Perk:) The light rail looks very fancy, but it's really a perception,
I think, that it's better rather than a reality.
(Flynn:) Buses haven't been afforded the same level of priority.
(Perk:) I'm Victoria Perk.
(Flynn:) I'm Jennifer Flynn.
(Perk:) I'm the director of the transit research program at the
Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
(Flynn:) I'm a senior research associate working in the National Bus Rapid Transit Institute.
Victoria, Jennifer, and their colleagues research
innovative ways cities can fix their traffic problems.
Including this half century old technology.
After the war, the United Kingdom was busy.
They were rebuilding and they authorized construction of new towns—
to move half a million people out of the slums into quality living spaces.
Now one of these was Runcorn. A new town near Liverpool.
It offered shopping, and green space, industrial areas all for 30,000 new people.
More people than the little British roadways could handle,
but too few to support a new subway or even a tram railroad.
So the town's planners cheated.
Oh, they built a 13-mile-long tram.
But it used asphalt instead of rails and buses instead of trains.
And then they left pretty much everything else the same.
So all these fake trains rolled down fake train tracks—
roads just for buses!
So traffic could never slow a bus down.
And that let Runcorn keep train quality clockwork
with buses arriving every seven minutes on the dot.
And the results certainly were not fake. Nearly one-third of trips in Runcorn were on the busway.
And it was a huge bargain considering the entire system only cost $3-million pounds.
In today's money, that'd be about $5-million U.S. dollars per mile.
Of course, the Runcorn system has an advantage:
The town's planners bragged to an industry magazine in 1971 about the city's unique design.
Everyone lives within one quarter mile of a busway station,
which makes it just about as convenient as going by car.
The world's first ever bus rapid transit system was a smashing success.
Major cities in Brazil, Canada ,Colombia,
and Nigeria were among some of the first to try and duplicate Runcorn's success.
And they did.
Especially bus rapid transit in South America.
Bogota sees 2 million passengers per year.
Wait...
What's that?
Oh, sorry.
Two million passengers... per day!
One of our first opportunities for BRT popped up in L.A. during the 1990s.
With all the animated drama you'd expect from the entertainment capital of the world.
(Cartoon narrator:) "Welcome to the Orange Line!"
(Cartoon character:) "Where's Jose?"
(Lamest joke ever:) "Probably stuck in traffic."
(Cartoon Jose:) "I'm coming, I'm coming! Wait for me!"
(Cartoon character:) "You ignored the warning signs!"
So, the Orange Line was supposed to be light rail. It was going to run
down the old Pacific Electric Red Line, a train that got torn out in the 1950s.
It was a good design and it had one problem:
a nearby state senator who thought trains were too noisy or something.
So he shoved through a law in 1991 that says all new rail projects in the San Fernando valley
must be in a tunnel.
That's stupid expensive!
But the law didn't say anything about buses having to travel in a tunnel...
L.A. Metro hoped that... maybe...
Perhaps, in the distant year of 2020, they might see 20,000 boardings each day.
Well, metro didn't have to wait that long.
(Flynn:) They said, wow you know we attracted our ridership. We achieved it in three four years.
It's no Trans-Millennio, but for the United States they'd built a successful bus rapid transit line.
(Flynn:) The definition of BRT is fuzzy. You know, it's not like light rail where
you know most people know what we're talking about.
That's partly due to the huge shopping list that light rail requires.
You have to put in a platform
You have to install signals and crossing gates
and you have to construct new railroad track for every inch of the project.
With bus rapid transit, the only thing you have to have
is a bus.
(Flynn:) BRT kind of allows you to have this very flexible, almost like a tool
kit. You can kind of customize them into different packages. They don't have to be
implemented all at once. You can do some things up front with plans for later on.
Los Angeles has deep pockets, so it's really easy for them to buy all the goodies, all the upgrades
everything they need to do to effectively turn the Orange Line into light rail on rubber tires.
But out of the 50 bus rapid transit systems in America, only 10 have their own dedicated busway.
So what about those other 40 systems?
BRT customization package #1:
Keeping buses out of traffic jams.
Okay, so you might not be able to afford a busway.
(Flynn:) The midway might be you know like a median bus lane.
Repurposing some of the roadway for transit only.
(Perk:) Painting that lane, so it really did make it stand out.
That may be an easy sale when you have lots of space and you can tell the public,
we're adding a brand new extra lane just for buses. It becomes a bit more controversial
when you have to say, sorry we're repurposing one of your existing car lanes just for buses.
(News anchor:) "Bus-only lanes, now in effect and we go and check 'em out..."
You might find the only feasible option is to send buses back into the traffic.
You just got to make sure they don't get caught in jams.
(Flynn:) They do use queue jumps. It's kind of like a little cutout of
the lane. And it allows the bus to veer off to the side and then pass everyone.
Two researchers at Florida International University found queue jumps give
a bus a speed boost between 3-17 percent.
This is great for smaller cities, like Madison, Wisconsin, who are implementing BRT over time.
(News anchor:) "Hoping to get the entire bus rapid
transit system up and running by 2024. This was just step one."
Package two: Getting people on buses, fast.
Bus rapid transit has a platform. It sits higher.
The bus's floor sits lower. Which means no stairs to climb.
People can just enter at level.
And that's great if somebody's in a wheelchair, they can just roll straight on.
Less time for passengers to board and more time for the bus to be in motion.
When it's too expensive to build a full train-station-like platform,
planners could dial it back a notch and build a quality bus stop.
But make sure you keep the kiosks. That way passengers can buy their
ticket before the bus arrives— just like they would a train ticket.
And that way they can board using any door, not just the front one.
There's no more making everybody wait as you dump quarters into the fare box.
The real magic is in the traffic signal computers, which can detect a bus approaching.
Specialized detectors can see a bus coming down the road.
To learn about similar loop and camera detectors for cars, check out my link above.
"...blew out the back end of the camera..."
(Flynn:) Travel times, I think on average, improved by 35 percent, in some of the early
studies they did. They determined that most of that was coming from the transit signal priority.
This helps offset time the bus stops at stations and makes travel time competitive with driving.
Sometimes, maybe even better.
I tried racing one.
Side-by-side a bus is kind of weird. He gets to stop for the passengers there.
Now, I think we leave the bus in the dust.
The bus is catching up with me again.
Well, that's fine. It makes for a more interesting video.
I honestly thought i was gonna film a video
where I'd blow the doors off the bus after the first stop would never see it again.
Transit signal priority must be like a guitar. Keeping everyone moving is like Van Halen sheet
music. Not everyone can play it. But in the hands of a skillful traffic engineer,
tapping two lanes with only one traffic signal, it's just plain rocks!
So fiddling with the traffic signals provides most
of BRT's time saving benefit, a lot of cities may ask themselves:
Why are we bothering to spend the money on all the other stuff?
(Perk:) Don't just add a couple of features and call it BRT.
(Flynn:) When local officials are faced with limited resources,
there can be a temptation to use the flexibility of BRT as cost cutting measure.
If the dedicated lane is gone and the queue jumps are gone
and there's no signal priority
people have to still climb stairs to board and the bus is blocking traffic...
...you might only have a fancy looking bus stop, along a very regular bus route!
(Perk:) There are many systems that call themselves BRT and maybe really aren't BRT.
They may have a couple of the features but not enough that's really adequate.
(Flynn:) They were promised great things and just left with some basic upgrades to bus service.
Over promised, under delivered, and you know, the community ends up feeling duped.
(Mayor John Curtis:) "Okay, I do not want this to turn into a BRT debate..."
(Critic:) "I feel like we're being, I don't want to stay bullied..."
(Critic:) "This is socialism and it's not going to happen..."
(Critic:) "A dramatic increase in transients and criminals..."
(Critic: "A vote for Robert Dyer is a vote to kill BRT...")
(Perk:) You know if you want to have some enhanced bus service, then call it something else.
(DeLaMare-Schaefer:) Don't get enamored because our system is shiny and working.
There was a lot of planning that went into this to make this happen.
Don't get stuck on a mode. Think about what your goal is and grow yourself into transit.
And also, you have to think about the goal:
Are you really after ridership?
Are you after coverage?
Are you after both?
(Flynn:) And don't forget about maintenance. You know maybe the cost of maintaining them
and the need to maintain them. You know, you plant all these great things and they grow and
then they grow way too much. If damage happens at a station, fix it and take care of it right away.
So I suppose it's time to answer the billion dollar question:
Is a bus rapid transit system as good as a light rail system?
And I think it comes down to two factors:
1. Did the transit agency that built it put in the love and care and investment
into the bus rapid transit system like they would have if this had been a light rail system?
2. Do you consider this a stinky smelly bus or would you actually ride this thing?
Now I can't speak for you, but I've got ridership data here. It
will tell us a little bit about what it was like.
Now, it's all pre-pandemic— It's from February (2020). That
UVX system in Utah that we talked about at the top of the video, it has about 12,000
riders per day on an 11-mile system, which comes out to about 1,100 people per mile.
The TRAX light rail system, that's also in Utah, one county north of UVX: It has 56,000 people
pre-pandemic per day on a 45-mile system— coming out to about 1,250 people per mile.
So that's about a 13% drop from light rail to the bus rapid transit.
Now looking at LA Metro's Orange "G" Line, it has
about 22,000 people on an 18-mile system— coming out to about 1,200 people per mile.
Versus the Gold "L" Line light rail, that's a 31-mile system, and has just shy of about 48,000.
It's about a 20% drop from the Gold Line LRT to the Orange Line BRT.
When you consider these systems cost one-third the price of light rail, I could see a lot of
transit agencies starting to seriously consider investing in a good bus rapid transit system.
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