Swift wrote: ↑Sat Jan 02, 2021 7:41 pm
Here's a You Tube video that discusses light rail vs bus rapid transit (BRT).
https://youtu.be/fh1IaVmu3Y8
What I gleaned from it is BRT works well for the 1/3 cost of LR as long as it includes all the vital features that define BRT without compromise during build or operation. I have not much hope of that knowing Sydney.
Adelaide would be the only hope of a fully functioning BRT system in Australia.
Light rail is difficult to justify in most situations in urban areas for cost alone according to the feature.
I just watched the whole of that video. The problem with the argument is that none of those US light rail systems they're comparing with runs to anywhere near its optimum capacity, whereas the bus lines (run by ordinary 110 passengers artics - though full marks to all-door loading!) are probably running near capacity. Runcorn, incidentally, is now twice the population originally predicted. I wonder how that's going with its quaintly British single door rigid buses?!
Two of my favourite illustrations of the nexus (or disconnect as the case may be) between urban planning/development and transit capacity and how it can turn to disaster as a result of choosing the wrong mode are these:
1. Here we see an early (1950s) medium density development out along a corridor (southern Anzac Pde) served by a mode with vehicles carrying 110-240 passengers. Within a couple of years, the transit was cut back to 70 passenger buses (headways being similar in both cases). Little further such development occurred along the outer end of this corridor subsequently and it awaits a metro line to unlock capacity for further development.
(Rob Caldwell photo)
2. A photo outside UNSW, with the then-new Roundhouse in the background), just before a mode with 110 passenger vehicles was removed and replaced with one using 70 passenger buses (the advent of articulated buses being still 15 years away and the ESR wasn't built to replace the trams as promised). The state's transport planners knew that within a mere three to four years the first wave of post-war boom babies would hit the universities, but they were faced with a crippling political directive. The wave was so huge that it overwhelmed the university's facilties and lectures for core subjects had to be held in the Science Theatre which had, iirc, a capacity of about 1,000. From that point it only went upwards until UNSW soon became one of Australia's largest universities. The bus system was, of course, overwhelmed and students started driving and parking out the streets around the university. Some of the former tramway was converted to "BRT" but it could not compensate for the lack of capacity.
(ABC image)
This development vs transit capacity scenario is being played out again on the Rydalmere-Olympic Park corridor, just as it has been so many times in the past. The least we can hope for is that they get it right this time.