Why I don’t love light rail transit

Buses have many advantages over subways, especially over trains running at street level (since these can't go much faster than traffic). The main advantage of subways is ironically that they are inflexible - they can't be gutted in times of budget deficit.

And I would suspect this is how Toronto differs from the average American city. American city governments experience periodic budget squeezes that force politicians to gut every service which is gut-able and buses are always a logical target.

And this leads to both buses being abandoned due to unreliability and for the bus lines that do exist to, uh, worthless, run at too infrequent intervals to pick up significant ridership. And this lead to buses having a terrible reputation, reinforcing the cycle of poor ridership.

It’s an incentives problem in the United States. In Japan, for example, the railways are private (so they need to turn a profit) and you usually have supermarkets and department stores on the stations. The stations are the hub. When you look at commuter lines into large cities in the US, you are driving hours to a parking lot with nothing but a platform near by.

It depends a lot on the city, but in high-traffic areas, buses are extremely slow and unreliable because they have to fight through the traffic jams. Dedicated bus lanes get around this, but it’s very hard to recapture the lane from car traffic at that point since the car drivers will see it as being taken from them.

If you’re building a new rapid transit line with dedicated ROW, it then comes down to BRT vs LRT and the cost of BRT and LRT aren’t actually that different I believe. The buses are cheaper up front but the maintenance cost on light rail vehicles is supposedly cheaper (plus, they can use electric power and are cleaner than diesel buses). The article’s criticisms would apply equally to BRT though.

Interesting article, except for the mumbo jumbo about feedback loops.

Development is all about land and cost. Suburbia hit critical mass because road networks were building out in the postwar economic stimulus and cars were cheaper than traditional infrastructure. Taxes were low because everything was new.

The driver of today’s changes is also about cost. We are out of suburban land. If you look at new construction in suburban areas, say around Boston, you see new build outs on shitty parcels. Apartment buildings 50 feet from the interstate, hilltop shopping centers, etc.

At the same time, the existing suburban housing stock is old and creaky. I was born in the late 70s, my parents are in their 70s and their house is 40 years old... and basically depreciated. It’s not going to yield great value because it needs lots of work. That’s not an atypical story.

A vital city like New York is another great place to look for guidance from. As the old ethnic neighborhoods collapsed, they turned to slums. The slumlords sucked the value out, and left cheap shells that attracted investment.

One thing I'm surprised this article didn't mention is commute times. To get from Weston Station (northwest of downtown) to Union Station takes:

- 22-minute drive (or 1h in rushour)

- 1.25-hour bus ride

- 13-minute LRT ride

LRT (light rail transit) really is an excellent way to get into the downtown core from distances and in time frames that were previously only manageable by car.

For the “changing routes” problem, I like trolleybuses, which won’t be reconfigured and don’t smell like diesel. Real estate near the wires can get the usual infrastructure boost. Dual-mode trolleybuses can also extend service past where the wires are and you still get the advantage of not stopping to charge. The power stations can be reused for a train as well. Dedicated ROW in a city center is mandatory regardless of vehicle if you want reliable service.

Toronto seems like a bit of an unfair example when you compare sheer ridership because it’s bigger than all but five US cities.

It's interesting to note that many SF residents find the T 3rd Street light rail to be slower and less frequent than the buses that it replaced.

I think subways work well because of their grade separation and extreme high capacity, but most surface rights would be better served by buses than light rail, and you can still create separated bus lanes for bus rapid transit instead of separated light rail if you have the money to spend.

Very-very short scoop: light rail provides neither the high bandwidth of a subway nor the wide coverage of a bus network, but costs a lot.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21044509

Spot on. I live in Minneapolis metro area, and commute to downtown Minneapolis via bus. The "express" bus from the suburb is not frequent enough and does not extend far so I can walk to my house after getting off.

Instead, I drive a good 10+ minutes to a park & ride, and get on the bus for the 45+ minutes ride to downtown. Also the buses could be electric and more comfortable, and have better lane management. Here in MSP, the transit buses can drive on the shoulder which are in terrible shape.

> and you’re the one who has to pay the cost of commuting distance

In Japan, the company pays for your commute, and the price of your commuter pass has no bearing on your pay. (There is a cap at most companies, and the average is 15170.8 yen per month (according to https://venture-finance.jp/archives/4982).)

(Unfortunately, as the company is forced to pay for your commute, the company is also allowed to dictate what route to take, which may in some cases mean less comfort. Neither you nor the company pay tax on this money, so misuse (and paying more than necessary could possibly be construed as misuse on part of the company) could in theory have bad consequences.)

When traffic in a city is inherently bad. It sets the foundation for difficulty in solving the problem with buses (increase frequency, priority express buses)

In a high traffic situation, ETA gets adjusted from time to time. And buses will struggle to get in/out of stops and delays loom when accident occurs on the road.

Poor road planning and building alongside with massive amount of cars on the road is one of the major issue.

Maybe workplace hours should be adjusted as a whole or varying tolls based on high demand hours to avoid everyone competing for road space.

But I generally agree with the article that buses gets you really far. For a long time Singapore was relying on bus routes to move people around the city state, and progressively build subway lines as the demand and city planning go with it.

I could not agree more. Public transit in the Portland (Oregon) metro area was much better (easier to access, predictable, faster, weather tolerant) when they prioritized buses and had no LRT. Now that the city is all-in on LRT the bus system is neglected and under provisioned.

My other big beef with LRT is that cities are dumping hundreds-of-millions of dollars in to single use track - LRT is only used for moving people, whereas money spent on buses funds roads, which benefit all aspects of commerce. Also, on another, tangent, LRT is plagued by weather related woes - at least in Portland, if it is too hot or too cold, the trains cannot even safely run. Bring back the buses!

I know this will sound super cynical and overly pedantic. But it's not the Koch brothers anymore. I was by no means a fan, but David is dead. Any funding is on Charles. Or perhaps Charles and David's heirs.

Things moving on rails are beautiful, buses are ugly. Beautiness is important.

This article is just BS. This is a line used vary often by fossil fuel advocates to dissuade investment in mass transit infrastructure. You see the fossil fuel lobby cannot say "screw mass transit, lets all drive" because after suffering couple of hours in traffic, every citizen will figure out that this theory is unworkable. So instead, they say "we don't need rail, we need buses, and we need to build "bus infrastructure" (which is just roads)." Then of course, the fossil fuel lobby can work behind the scenes to gut the bus budget and the "bus infrastructure" can be used for cars instead.

The lobbyists then say "Buses are for ordinary people, railroads are for the rich, blah blah blah". Usually, this line completely ignores the fact that buses and railroads cost about the same in most places.

To his credit the author does address this fact here, but his analysis is shallow and downright silly. He says, "yes they cost the same, but railroads are usually in more expensive neighborhoods." Well, yeah we live in age when high density neighborhoods are expensive and getting pricier all the time and Light rail is most suitable for high density neighborhoods. So that is not surprising.

And then he complains about how light rail makes home prices go up. Yeah, well that just means it is successful. When a city service is successful, it makes the area it serves more desirable which people from less desirable areas want to move there which makes prices go up.

The response to that should not be to make everything less desirable to ensure affordability, but to learn from the successful and desirable places and make all parts as successful and desirable. Thus, eventually there won't be enough rich people to move in, and you will have just a nice affordable livable city. Would you be in favor of setting half a city on fire in order to make the other half more affordable to live in?

His graphs show that he is trying to mislead readers. Why do you think he made the color of bus lines in Toronto so similar to the color of light rail in Toronto? Or why did he color certain high usage bus lines that prove his point in bright red, and certain low usage bus lines that do not prove his point in much darker shades, and then in the legend he only said that the bright red lines are bus lines. Or why did he split the most popular Toronto street car line in two? He said "I separated out the 504A and 504B so that they’d fit on the graph; otherwise it’d break the y axis." They would not only break the y axis, buddy, they would also break the entire premise of your article.

If he had a dot that represented a light rail line that is much twice as high as any of the bus lines, then his premise that light rail is unnecessary because it can be handled by a bus line kind of goes out the window. But that is the reality.

He correctly says that light rail and buses work best in combination with buses being feeders for light rail lines. This increases the ridership of both buses and light rail. But that fact leads to the conclusion that both light rail and buses must be built. This is what most cities try to do nowadays. Instead the author draws the absolutely wrong conclusion that light rail needs not be built.

So yeah in conclusion this is a typical professionally made manipulative troll article. It has a couple of nuggets of self evident truth to get some authenticity and not look like a complete troll, it tries to harness a lot of pre-existing anger about an issue (high housing prices) and disingenuously channel that anger towards his issue (less light rail), and it has some graphs that are very carefully designed to be confusing and misleading to the max.

If we are comparing to a successful "subway plus bus" model, isn't light rail clearly filling the "subway" role in the model, not the "bus" role?

What? Light rail is really crap. 45 minutes from Sunnyvale to San Jose. It's slower than biking. It's covering like 6 miles in that time. 9 miles an hour? Really?

Streetcars in Toronto are in fact light rail, doesn't that invalidate this entire argument?

One can argue some LRT implementations have the same limitations as buses, but you can't call them buses, point to their success, and say that means buses are the only answer.

It's clear that Toronto's mix of subway, LRT, and buses are successful, and perhaps that's what should be emulated.

This person has it all wrong. Suburbs were created artificially, and it just doesn’t matter. Mixed income neighbourhoods are the desired result of all development. The pockets, rings, and regions of classist housing is the problem, not its location or how we navigate them.

Yes, the feedback loops is true, blah blah blah, but author needs to dig deeper.

It's not that complicated really - there's a three-level hierarchy in public transport systems:

1. If the road traffic is congested, the solution is bus lanes.

2. If the bus lanes are congested, the solution is light rail rapid transit.

3. If the light rail is congested, the solution is a subway/train line.

Does the DC metro count as light rail? It's... not luxurious. Maybe new light rail is nice, but I've never ridden one. Regardless, I see the point the author is making. I'll probably look harder at the buses around here.

I can't make the sense of the author's graphs. Is he plotting daily boardings on both the X and Y axes simultaneously? Aside from bus vs. streetcar, what do the varying colors mean?

Two things on my mind reading this article are:

1. I am not convinced the idea of commuting as "self-correcting mechanism" was presented well (or much at all). I was expecting to learn a bit more about this point.

2. Half of the points have a counter-example in both Houston and Dallas, where most of the LRT doesn't go to wealthy residential parts of town. Some of those rich parts of town are still actively fighting it coming near them, in fact.

Those two cities come to mind because I have experience living in both, and can compare with my experiences living in denser, older cities like Tokyo, Berlin, and Santiago, where a variety of networks were built for different reasons across different eras. Then again, even in Santiago, the the subway stops just before you get too deep into residential parts of Las Condes.

But I am also a non-expert, and at the end of the day, instead of going point-for-point and saying "Well, look at what Dallas did. Surely [blah, blah, blah]" there are two factors that weigh heavier on my mind: cost and historical political context.

Cost is foremost. While LRT is less efficient long-term, it is cheaper to build transit at-grade by about a factor of five (I read this long ago and forget where, or I would happily source). Histotical context, in that many grand subway systems get built in a time where, for the city to prove it was a top-tier global city, you demonstrated civic grandeur and engineering prowess by building a subway system. The prestige was used to push past the barrier of it being eye-wateringly expensive. Also while we have made these options safer over time, it has come at a (worthwhile, but non-zero) cost of more regulatory checks that have made the cost gap even greater, and harder to cover by dreaming of prestige

Both cost and context ultimately combine into political feasibility.

For a city like Denver, Dallas or Houston, if you ask the transit wonks who fight the good fight at the municipal level, I don't think you would find many that truly would choose LRT over other commuter rail, all else equal. But all else was not equal. Cost was the big barrier, and the context did not exist to cross that chasm, so they got what they could, when they could.

Houston only got its network because of a starry-eyed chance at the Olympics and/or Super Bowl. Originally it was just one line, then a plan for a 5-line network, of which 3 were built, but now possibly up to 4 again. I could write an entire essay on the mistakes made along the way, public and private, in that first line. Just look at the land-use (really the land-lack-of-use) in Midtown between 2000 and 2010 despite the LRT's presence. Yet the power of a network grows with every additional line, so once you at least have something, you might as well leverage that and add to it, rather than sell the public on a completely different approach.

In the end, I share the concerns of the author, but I do not see the narrative being quite as clean when I set it against the specific cases I am familiar with.