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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

He makes an argument that light rail is both less efficient and serves a limited population. I think it's good argument and a fairly well-known argument - light rail has been a poor use of transit dollars for a long time, it's only benefit is bragging rights since it can never be faster than ordinary traffic and it inherently costs more than buses. Medium rail and other system capable of faster movement than traffic is a different thing (but that's been neglected since it costs more to start and it doesn't give the cities more obvious bragging right). The only "benefit" of light rail is it makes it harder to abandon when the going gets tough. The flexibility of buses should be advantage but this flexibility means they're easy to gut in a circumstance of budget deficits.

All you are saying "why not have both" but if one is strictly worse than the other, there's no reason to have both, you can do better with one.

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> it's only benefit is bragging rights since it can never be faster than ordinary traffic

Since the author is including LA's rail system in his stats, I'll just say that this is not correct here. Metro Rail lines are frequently faster than surface traffic along close parallel routes and often faster than with-flow freeway traffic, which is not particularly surprising considering that at most crossings they're either given bridges, tunnels, or signal-protected right-of-way.

You could argue that we could do the same thing with buses, but to the extent that a bus line requires special infrastructure to support the more efficient travel, any cost-efficiency advantage is likely to narrow or disappear.

I think all that matters is if a transit system has exclusive right of way lanes that doesn't interference from the general road network is what would make it fast. If it uses busses, light rail or heavy rail, the difference is only throughput.

For many people although LRT means a train sharing the road, sometimes, which make them as slow as busses, for a lot more money for something that doesn't have the same throughput demands, which I agree when I've tried out sf muni.

Agreed. Portland's light rail is quick until you get to downtown, where it shares the road with cars. Where I lived at one point, taking the bus was much faster. Additionally every train line has to cross one particular bridge, which is a massive choke point. A subway or elevated would be much quicker.

I'm staring at an Orange Line train outside my window that crosses the Tilikum but doesn't cross the Steel, but yeah, Red/Blue/Green are bottlenecked there. The contrast between the lines that go over the Steel bridge and the lines that don't are kind of my point, though.

The orange line becomes the yellow line, which also crosses the Steel bridge.

But the Orange line still terminates at PSU, and it also sometimes becomes the Green at PSU. You also don't have to stay on the train past city center, and Steel Bridge raises don't affect the intended Orange Line service to and from city center; trains just circulate at Union to minimize delays.

That's by design, which is my point. The Yellow and bus lines across the Steel are always affected more than the Orange line, and the ability to terminate at Union on a bridge raise allows for bus transfers over other bridges—it's integrated to play to the strengths of combining bus, streetcar, and LRT, and minimize the weaknesses of the Steel bottleneck. It's also why it's not just a Yellow line extension south.

Actually Los Angeles cut bus service for light rail expansions (which some say severely hurt ridership). So it's a perfect example supporting the author.

Regarding being stuck in traffic: there's plenty of downtown streetcars without dedicated lanes stuck in traffic built around 2010s.

> Los Angeles cut bus service for light rail expansions (which some say severely hurt ridership).

Are we talking about cutting bus routes along light rail routes, or are we talking cutting bus service connecting to / or outside of light rail routes?

> So it's a perfect example supporting the author.

If true, it can support the author's point that past a certain municipal density a good public transit system needs robust bus service as much or more than it needs rail backbones, which I agree with.

It doesn't speak to the central point of my comment above, however, which is that rail is not merely a luxury, it's often much more efficient in terms of the speed with which it moves its passengers, and necessarily so unless the same sort of infrastructure built to support it is built to support a bus, likely approaching similar costs per passenger mile.

> Regarding being stuck in traffic: there's plenty of downtown streetcars without dedicated lanes stuck in traffic built around 2010s.

I assume this is not LA talking about LA any more.

> it's only benefit is bragging rights since it can never be faster than ordinary traffic

This is 100% false. I take Philly's Market-Frankford line many days, it's absolutely faster and easier than driving. But I guess maybe you aren't counting elevated / buried rail.

Even still, give the trains priority and they will beat traffic.

The blue and orange Subway lines in Philly are not light rail. Light rail in Philly would be the green lines heading into west Philly, the trolley on Girard Ave (55?) Heading east/west on the northern edge of the downtown core, and the lines heading out west from the 69th street terminal. Interestingly, they cover the spectrum, with the 55 in traffic all of the time, the green lines underground on dedicated rails on the most congested part of their routes and in mostly two lane traffic for the rest, and the high speed lines on dedicated tracks connecting the far edge of West Philly, where the market Frankfort terminates, to outer suburbs.

Part of the problem around light rail is that it's so broad. Just looking at the range of meanings of light rail in Philly, I have no idea how anyone talking about "light rail" could say that their argument applies to all of the forms it could take.

Also I can confirm that Philly's combination of light and heavy rail will get you from many places in the city and suburbs to downtown faster than driving. Buses do an adequate job of last mile in the suburbs but even several miles outside the city there's still a good fraction of the population within a half mile of a rail stop. My point is that this system exists because rail lines were built through the middle of nowhere by the steel industry 100+ years ago. The tracks, rail cars, stations, and signals have all been replaced but the right-of-way remained. The author focused too much on the method of transit and not the long-term strategic benefits of a city owning a dedicated transit route to allow for future growth.

edit: added 2nd paragraph responding to parent comment

> Light rail in Philly would be the green lines heading into west Philly

No, those are trolleys. Explicitly not light rail. You can't compare a trolley seriously to the trains we're calling "light rail" in LA and other cities.

'The basic concepts of light rail were put forward by H. Dean Quinby in 1962 in an article in Traffic Quarterly called "Major Urban Corridor Facilities: A New Concept". Quinby distinguished this new concept in rail transportation from historic streetcar or tram systems as:

having the capacity to carry more passengers appearing like a train, with more than one car connected together'

Note that first and second qualifier for light rail, which a one-car trolley with capacity identical to a bus absolutely does not fit. Light rail has a specific meaning, and it's different from trolley/tram by design. If SEPTA or others are calling the trolleys light rail, they are misusing the term.

Additionally, as a counterexample to the issues in the article - the trolleys are taken more by the working poor than the more affluent in Philly.

Until recently, buses meant spewing fumes all over the city, which hopefully we're trying to reduce. BEV buses might be changing this, but they still come with their own logistical challenges.

Or natural gas buses, which don't produce that obnoxious diesel soot.

But still produce plenty of Carbon Dioxide point source in the middle of traffic.

>since it can never be faster than ordinary traffic

Of course it can. Just give them priority at intersections like lots of cities do.

Of course, you can do the same with a bus too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit

Sure, but why? The vast majority of the cost for a good rail system is in the dedicated right of way, overpasses for intersections and the stations, a BRT wouldn't be significantly cheaper. https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/10/12/brt-is-not-cheaper-th...

Maybe not when used as a complete system -- the advantage is that you can piece in a BRT in specific areas where it would be advantageous, while the majority of the system consists of buses on regular streets.

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