The term "rapid transit" refers to capacity. Limited stops, longer vehicles, grade-separation, higher frequencies, all-door boarding, signal priority, these are all methods of increasing capacity, and thus all are feature of rapid transit. Grade separation implies very long vehicles operating at very high frequencies with signal priority. Grade separation is a means to reducing the interference of a transit line with other traffic. It says nothing about the quality of the service.
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Originally Posted by nito
Relative to London, too many places outside the capital provide a substandard experience where private bus companies would compete with other modes of transit, as well as operating confusing and incompatible fare models. You also have situations where a lack of co-ordination meant buses would not provide a satisfactory interchange with light or heavy rail stations. London shows that buses can be immensely successful when managed competently: more than 2,000mn journeys are made each year on the famous red buses, compared to 200mn bus journeys in Greater Manchester.
The good news is that this situation is starting to change; Transport for Manchester is set to take control over all buses across Greater Manchester in early 2023 and other cities are likely to follow suit.
If you want people to use public transport, you need to have safe, reliable, frequent, and accessible services depending on the urban environment.
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Yes, lack of integration of transit, and I also read about some neighbourhoods losing bus service completely. Again, some very basic components of a transit network. Manchester's transit ridership is surprisingly low, so it is good to hear they are finally starting to take back control of their system to be able address these basic problems and I hope the rest of UK follows suit.
I think the basic things is also the problem with places like Nashville. There are so many gaps in the bus network, with many neighbourhoods without any service, and most of the routes are "hub-and-spoke" routes, very few "crosstown" routes. So even if you are lucky enough to live AND work near a bus route, you are unlikely to be able to get there in reasonably direct way. If you need to take two buses, you will have to transfer downtown. You might have to travel 15km by bus, even if the destination is only 5km away.
For a small and underdeveloped system like Nashville, completing the bus network would improve the travel times far more than any BRT measures or LRT. Add more routes to reduce walking distances, and more crosstown routes for more direct travel. Then as ridership and fare revenue increases, then increase the frequencies to match, which would reduce travel times even more.
When the ridership increases too much, then the buses start to slow down, because they stop more frequently to let passengers on and off, and spend time at each stop. That's when you start to introduce rapid transit measures like bigger vehicles, exclusive ROWs, all-door boarding, limited stops, grade separation to increase capacity and minimize those delays. Rapid transit is to solve the problem of high ridership, not the problem of low ridership. If there's no one on the bus, and no waiting at the bus stops, the buses are going to be fast. So for places like Nashville to even think about any sort of rapid transit now is just thinking way too far ahead. They think about the final steps when they can't even take the first steps. They want to build a complex system, and forget about the most basic things. Making transit more complicated than it actually needs to be, that is the common theme with these low ridership systems in the US, and it is also part of the problem with UK transit right now as the result of privatization and deregulation.
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