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Old Posted Feb 12, 2013, 5:11 PM
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Cirrus Cirrus is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Washington, DC
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>> Watson, not Nelson.
It looks to me like Watson is already right-in/right-out only. Lefts are physically possible but against the law. No loss there.

>> But then you're looking at higher operating costs.
Probably not. Operating costs is the main reason it's so insane to cram 100,000 riders on a bus route. The biggest operating cost with buses is usually the drivers, and it takes a lot of buses to move that many people. If you could replace 3 buses with 1 train it would dramatically reduce your operating costs, because that's 2 fewer drivers on the route. The fact that you might still have some buses wouldn't matter. The calculation for the remaining buses would stay the same, but the calculation for the buses that could be replaced with trains would drop a lot.

>> mixed traffic introduces its own bunching problems.
Again, this is irrelevant. The bunching problems with streetcars would not be worse than they are with the existing buses, therefore it's not a legitimate argument for continuing to use buses instead of upgrading to streetcar. It would be an argument against picking streetcar instead of SkyTrain, or over light rail in a dedicated transitway, but that isn't what we're talking about. I've already said SkyTrain is a better option at least twice, as long as it's actually going to happen. We are not talking about SkyTrain versus streetcar. We are talking about streetcar versus bus.

If SkyTrain is going to happen then this is just an academic discussion about the value of streetcars versus buses, which is something I'm interested in. I am not advocating for streetcar instead of SkyTrain. SkyTrain is unequivocally better. I don't know how many more times or how many different ways I have to say this.

>> There's no money for both. The transit authority is "very inefficient" with system-wide operating cost recovery
This is exactly why a streetcar would make sense. For such a high ridership route, shorter vehicles are extremely inefficient since you need so many drivers. Broadway would have higher cost recovery if it wasn't moving such a huge number of passengers in small vehicles. Other than its initial capital cost, streetcars would have no downside but would save huge amounts of money in operating, because you could move the same number of people with fewer vehicles.

Streetcars do not make sense on low ridership routes, but we're talking about what might be the highest ridership bus route on the continent.
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