What advantages are there over bus service?
There’s nothing stopping a road from being smooth but, logistically, there’s clearly no reason to rush to repair roads when they deteriorate. That means potholes get tolerated, potholes means suspension, and both of those mean bus-like rides instead of suburban light rail rides.
Railway track has to be flat. Anything less than perfect is intolerable so it tends to hold its maintainers to a higher bar.
I've found the new battery buses to be far more comfortable to ride in than older diesel buses since they remove the vibration when idling. The extra weight might mean more potholes to repair though.
And lastly badly maintained railway lines are just as prone to causing motion sickness as badly maintained roads.
You’re absolutely right about potholes, technically, but my point was more about how people work not the immediate technical difference between road and rail.
If you have a system that requires 100% upkeep in order to function at all — the rails of a tram system — then it receives nothing less than the complete maintenance it demands.
The social and technical economics of roads, on the other hand, practically ensures that they’re only ever barely maintained to the lowest possible standard people (and air suspension) will tolerate.
Trams, the divas that they are, will tolerate nothing less than perfection!
Perhaps that's true where you are but it is simply not true in large parts of northern Europe. I'll grant you that a lot of UK roads are a disgrace though
The fact that buses are so flexible and easily (and cheaply) rerouted makes developers less likely to build developments that rely on access to transit, but once a community spends a hundreds of millions of dollars on a light rail line, they know it's there for the long term.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/27/steetcar-...
Jarrett Walker has a good piece about it: https://humantransit.org/2025/05/what-was-wrong-with-the-was...
I agree with him that in order to endure and justify a permanent operating subsidy a transit service needs to be useful and used by many people. Most American light rail doesn't meet that bar.
I think there is another aspect that usually goes unstated, which is the vibes. If you're a mayor you want to build a tram. If you're a tourist you want to ride a tram. If you're a prospective resident you want to live near a tram. Yes, it's smoother and yadda yadda, but really it's because it has more sex appeal. A technically equivalent bus may well be _technically_ equivalent but could never be truly equivalent. Nobody would write a play entitled A Technically Equivalent Bus Named Desire. In a way, spending money on a tram is similar to spending money on parks or flowers or public art. And so we will spend the money; and we will build the streetcar; and damn the technical equivalence.
I wonder what the world would be like if we were honest with ourselves.
Wiki tells me:
> The DC Streetcar is a surface streetcar network in Washington, D.C. that consists of a single line running 2.2 miles (3.5 km) in mixed traffic along H Street and Benning Road in the city's Northeast quadrant.
a longtail ebike, a pushchair with/for 2 kids (horizontal arrangement), a dining table for 6 people and 30 kg of cement
I tried it, and with most of em they don’t let you on a bus or you can’t fit but tram is fine
Modern urban light rail is also typically electric, using overhead power. Although buses can also use this.
This is one of the main reasons the super dense Japanese cities aren't as air poluted as other urban centers.
Not really that efficient...
And, as has been rediscovered about 200 times in Southern California (by the drivers, not by the sstate government), you can add additional lanes almost indefinitely, and it doesn't really help congestion that much.
You can make the same argument (in terms of space) about a train track. The real advantage of trains (light or heavy) is permanence. It's easy for the next government to remove the bus lanes because "OMG too much traffic, one more lane will fix it." It's much more difficult to rip out a rail line and convert it to a road.
A rail track for the same route sits empty just as much.
> you can add additional lanes almost indefinitely, and it doesn't really help congestion that much.
I don't think adding bus-only lanes would have that effect. Adding lanes for private vehicles reduces congestion, which encourages people to move to places along the route until the congestion reaches the previous barely-tolerable level (as I understand it).
Busses aren't much more efficient when riding down a lane than lower occupancy vehicles, but streets aren't bottlenecked by their roads, they're bottlenecked by their intersections. The key advantage of a bus is at the intersection. A bus holds the intersection for far less time than the equivalent passenger capacity of cars.
The problem bus lanes try to solve is dominantly that without them the traffic advantage of people riding busses mostly goes to people not riding busses, and this makes for a pretty terrible incentive structure. Busses are intrinsically disadvantaged against cars (schedules, uncertainty, routes), so if you don't help them, then people will prefer to drive. Bus lanes internalize the externality.
While that bus lane may look empty most of the time it likely carries far more people per hour than the congested car lane next to it.
> While the Lincoln Tunnel’s car lane can only move 3,000 people per hour in each car lane, its bus lane moves 30,000 people per hour.
https://transalt.org/blog/bus-commutes-are-significantly-lon...
> Now the XBL handles 1,850 buses that carry more than 70,000 passengers from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. each weekday, which comes to 600 buses an hour. The bus lane operates at its maximum capacity for 90 minutes of its four-hour operation.
https://www.govtech.com/transportation/fed-funds-study-of-ai...
Here in San Francisco along Mission St we have about 20 articulated buses an hour in each direction. These have a planning capacity of 94, 85% load standard 80, 125% crush capacity 119 according to https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSF/comments/445xdg/what_is_the_m....
While mostly a bus and taxi lane Mission St allows local traffic within each block so buses are still a minority of the vehicles in the lane.
Meanwhile the main 2 lanes in each direction street nearby has 1020 vehicles an hour in the peak direction. At 1.6 people per vehicle that's only about 830 people per lane at rush hour. So even at 'standard capacity' the buses in a regular city street not completely dedicated bus lane carry double the number of people. (From experience I suspect it is somewhat more than that.)
That's a bus every 5.1 seconds. In a single lane. (and at 30mph it'll take 1.5 of that 5 seconds just for the bus itself to pass. That's very marginal braking distance).
Also, 1850 / 4 is 453, not 600.
The article I quoted to which you are replying suggests 600 busses an hour. I don't think that is unreasonable for a dedicated highway lane into a bus terminal. There's a nice picture of it here: https://abc7ny.com/port-authority-lincoln-tunnel-technology-...
> Also, 1850 / 4 is 453, not 600.
Quoted in the post you are replying to:
> Now the XBL handles 1,850 buses that carry more than 70,000 passengers from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. each weekday, which comes to 600 buses an hour. The bus lane operates at its maximum capacity for 90 minutes of its four-hour operation.
I read that as they reach the maximum capacity of 600 buses an hour only for the 90 minutes of rush hour. Across the 4 hours it operates each bus averages 38 passengers (70000/1850). It seems reasonable to assume that the rush hour buses are more packed given they are looking at ways to increase capacity and have you ever taken a rush hour bus in a big city?!
From the picture linked above these seem to be 53 seat coaches for longer distance routes rather than city buses which would carry more passengers with some standing. 50 * 600 = 30,000. It's in the ballpark!
And your bus only lane has a lot more options. If there is a major disaster you can divert other traffic (not necessarily all traffic though that is an option) into it which might be a useful compromise at time. If you need to repair your bus only lane you just divert the bus to regular traffic. For that matter most places there isn't any traffic and so a bus in mixed traffic has no downsides thus not costing you that whole lane (or track), just build the bus-only lane where it is needed.
Trains are a good thing when they do something a road cannot. However the common bus can be just as good for much less. If you have the money and want good service and ride quality the bus can do it too, and typically for much less cost than a train.
Trains are good where they don't mix with traffic (meaning elevated or underground) because they can then be automated (and also faster). Alternatively a train can hold more people, so if you are in the rare situation where a 100 passenger bus every 5 minutes can't handle the passengers a train is good. Most of the time though you are not in either situation and so a bus can do everything a train can.
Unless the track is just in a regular lane that can be full of cars/busses/trucks whenever there isn’t a light train. Like how trams work in most of the world
Other advantages: people who don't drive, which includes children can get about. Lots of public transport can compensate alot for un walkability of suburbia.
Bus rapid transit, when done right (basically, almost like a tram) can be quite successful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh1IaVmu3Y8
Since it's harder to make that choice when you're building rail, it's more likely to be done right.