Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
LRT is not the answer in low ridership and spread out cities like Austin. If they spend that amount of money, they would be far better off with transitways and BRT lanes. Id it better to get 20km of new LRT with a subway or 200km of BRT serving hundreds of thousands of more people and thousands of more destinations? As for this idea that Americans wouldn't be caught dead on a bus then again, what's the point of LRT? In sprawling Austin, very few people are going to actually live near a station nor will their destination so they will still have to take the bus regardless.
Many US have cities have tried this notion that when it comes to LRT, "build it and they will come" but the reality is that in most these cities they haven't come. For most, all they ended up with people switching from the bus to the train but no new riders. Many LRT cities have per-capita ridership levels much lower than they did 30 years ago. Ottawa, which just built it's new Metro to replace the extremely successful Transitway, has managed to piss off many of it's riders because now their commute times have increased due to having to now transfer onto the LRT instead of enjoying their once seamless bus ride. Ottawa would have been far better served by building a bus-only tunnel a la Seattle as the tunnel was needed as there were so many buses in downtown Ottawa leading to bus gridlock
The comfort, speed performance, and operational costs benefits of LRT over buses, that too has been greatly narrowed. LRT will certainly always be a smoother and quieter ride than a bus due to running on rails but with the advent of battery powered buses, buses are far more beneficial than the diesel ones. The new battery buses offer far faster acceleration and a much more quiet one than their diesel counterparts, and offer the operation costs advantages of LRT by not having to pay for huge diesel bills. The newer DOUBLE articulated buses also increase capacity significantly and would be more than enough for even the busiest of LRT lines in the US. BRT is also far easier and cheaper to expand and doesn't have the maintenance costs of maintaining the maintain/replacing the overhead catenary or rails.
|
Have you been to Austin? A large percentage of people work within walking distance of these proposed downtown stations. From an employment perspective it's one of the single most downtown-centralized metros in the country. Austin is not the decentralized spread-out city that you are imagining. (DFW, yes.)
BRT would still need its own ROW to be successful. There is no room on the surface streets to make that happen. It's either elevate or go underground. Underground solves the need to make room for stations, too.