My experience has been less than stellar. Busses coming 20 minutes late or not at all. 545 at 6 pm on a weekday is so over packed I feel like I’m going to second base with half of the bus.
Seattle should look to a city like Vienna or Prague. The transportation systems are surprisingly well engineered but that might be due to the fact that a larger part of the population takes it.
I'm not a transit engineer but I think this is because we are asking buses to do too much. When a route sends a bendy bus every 10 minutes it's no longer a bus route and is now a really expensive train. The Rapid Rides are packed at rush hour as well. What we need is something like light rail that can go between neighborhoods and then let buses move people within those areas.
"Expensive trains" seem in style, for whatever reason. There are routes that run buses every 4 minutes here. There are other routes that run every 10m, with electric buses on caternary wires. I'll take a good bus line over a non-existent rail line any day. I love trains but if bus lanes and BRT infra are politically expedient, good enough for me.
Because a bus lane is actually a really cheap train. Construction costs are minimal, your "stations" are generally unmanned, and cheap, and if you need to reroute for construction it generally is much less a big deal. There is basically no point at which subway tracks are cheaper than BRT.
The big issue with the Cheap Trains of busses is the lack of commitment that is otherwise nice for transit authorities is not an advantage for real estate. BRT just doesn't indicate commitment to the route enough to really boost property. This is why even though tram lines are basically just busses that can't get out of the way they have a much more marked effect on real estate and neighborhood development.
Tram tracks last about 35 years here in Zurich, but some of the hotspots have to be redone every 8 years. It also heavily depends on the type of trams you‘re running.
Trains are going to beat buses on cost per passenger mile on any decently trafficked route, generally to the point of covering their own operating costs.
You don't have to go straight to subway. Surface light rail can use the same stops as buses. All you need is to lay rails on the street, and you get transit that is vastly more comfortable and inviting than buses.
Setting up dedicated lanes and then running a bus on them is just a waste.
Right of way is the majority of the cost, but grade separation is really, really important. If you don't grade separate, every grey crossing is 1 dead person a year, and likely 2 or 3 car crashes[1]. Idiot drivers just can't be trusted around trains, and billing them damages doesn't prevent the issue from recurring (usually just drives people to bankruptcy).
What we can do is steal some of Portland's better ideas, and put up a green wall on either side of the tracks with shrubbery, bollards at every grey crossing (and gates on the pedestrian crossings) to separate the tracks cost effectively.
We can keep the body count low and trains timely, if we change minor things to effectively separate the rail from other modes of transit.
A bus every 4 minutes is still generally cheaper (and lower capacity) than a tram or high frequency commuter rail.
For instance, here there are a couple of bus routes which do every 6 minutes or so at peak times; each bus takes 80 people. However, the tram lines run every 4 minutes at peak times; each tram takes 360 people.
That's really sad since the tracks already exist on the Eastside (it's the "Eastside Rail Corridor") which Sound Transit is bound and determined to pretend does not exist.
The line extends from Renton to Bothell. Kirkland is only part of it.
In all the articles in the Seattle Times about light rail, the Sound Transit public relations materials, etc., the Eastside Rail Corridor is never, ever, mentioned. How is it that Kirkland has managed a conspiracy of silence about it?
Kirkland is in favor of what the other cities are doing, which is ripping out the rails and replacing with park amenities (so-called "rails to trails"). They even managed to help defeat an effort by the Ballard Spur Railroad to keep rail service on the corridor.
The city council there has been opposed to rail on the ERC ever since Sound Transit 3 was a gleam in the eye. They've wanted BRT, over Sound Transit's objections, because they deem it more compatible with trail uses and not taking up as much space in the corridor. (And able to be located on the eastern edge of the corridor, preserving views to the west. So, yet again, needed infrastructure takes a back seat to scenery.)
The North Lake Washington communities all blow chunks. Asshole bored cops ready to pull you over at a whim, shitty politicians that fight reasonable proposals, and severely crippled infrastructure (No sidewalks, unreliable power, bad internet (due to unenforced franchise agreements), poor sewer availability, etc), every time I head up there it bemuses me that people pay a premium for such poor living conditions.
There isn't even a consistent scheme to the roads up there, they just deadend, with SR-522 being the only arterial (which is totally wrecked 7 hours a day!). Nevermind the shit many of the people that went to school up there had to deal with, makes Seattle Public Schools look reasonable when compared to the shenanigans administrators at those north end schools would play on many of the students they were supposed to be helping.
I hope for those trapped in that area that things get better, but it seems like so many of the newer neighbors in my area are flooding out of the communities on the north end of the lake.
Are several of those extended buses really more expensive than light rail? There's a lot of upfront cost for light rail and if demand changes, routes are pretty inflexible.
Demand almost never changes. Most bus routes are still virtually identical to the streetcar routes they replaced.
And the required infrastructure for light rail creates more demand for development along the line, as the rail itself signals more permanence to developers: they do not worry about it moving in a decade, like a bus route could.
The development demand is not a guarantee, and it can also come at the cost of destroying local businesses which cannot afford the downturn in customers during construction- many of which are small, minority owned sole proprietorships.
As for demand never changing... well, everything changes.
Source: Personal anecdata from living in an area where local government has been pushing more and more light rail development hard, in spite of never actually delivering any of the promised benefits to traffic congestion, ridership levels, community or business development.
I read somewhere that the real benefit of trams or light rail tend to come from the fact that they often come with a redesign of the traffic flows, right of way etc. Whilst busses are often stuck in the old traffic jam.
Bus rapid transit, of the sort you find in South America, has a lot of benefits of light rail without the initial startup cost of putting in rails for the reasons you describe: Dedicated rights of way, signal priority, and a lack of speed-killing sharp turns.
Bus rapid transit is a great compromise. They have special right of ways with dedicated signaling and lanes. But no need to lay rail so costs are much lower.
Not really. Had the "road diet" actually resulted in a shift from cars to transit, the transit agencies would show a corresponding increase in their census and farebox return. They didn't.
However, there is an induced demand effect where because there are less cars, more people will drive. So in effect an extra lane appears, empty of the people riding the bus.
But long-term the maintenance is significantly higher, as you need to replace the road surface very frequently.
A usual bus stop, or a BRT lane, has to be replaced every 6 months if it’s asphalt, and every 18 to 24 months if it’s cobblestone. That’s a significant expense.
While you can build and use light rail for decades.
Pure concrete leads to significant shifts between the plates over the years, leading to the well-known bump every time you pass between plates. This obviously affects the bus’s suspension, and passengers, negatively.
Concrete with asphalt on top of it has the issue of the asphalt having to be replaced frequently.
I’m not sure if US interstates with concrete are different, but these were the only options discussed here in Germany.
Busses have higher operating costs per trip/mike/other measures, because there are way more drivers per rider vs rail. They’re obviously less expensive capital cost.
Every bus needs a driver and a vehicle with yet another powertrain. I'm not sure what energy consumption is like on a train but I suspect operating costs of all the buses is higher than a train that can cover longer distances. It seems to me a mix is the best solution.
Can you name examples where this oft-predicted result has actually happened (in the USA, anyway)? That certainly hasn't been the result in the Bay Area.
It definitely happened in Portland when they ran the Orange line. We were house-hunting a year or two before the new light rail opened, and realtors showing houses along its route were already starting to make a point of mentioning it.
As soon as it actually opened, neighborhoods that could use it suddenly got a lot more desirable (read: expensive).
Bethesda, Maryland. It was very sleepy before it became a metro stop. In the last 30 years it had a crap ton of development mostly centered around the metro.
Actually... Can you name a few places in a metro area that didn't experience such a boom after a transit stop was introduced? In the bay area even? I feel like I have only ever seen examples of it being good for retail, restaurants, home values.
Metro considers itself traditional fixed rail, not light rail.
a metro area that didn't experience such a boom
I was responding to the specific claim "Light rail will create demand to live near and locate businesses near the stations." The point isn't about whether a broad area benefits from rail (vs. no rail at all) but whether adding light rail to a fully built-out environment will drive more dense business development near the added rail and because of the addition of rail. I don't know of any USA data that supports that.
Take a ride from the Seattle airport to downtown on the light rail sometime, then. You will see a lot of nice looking apartments that didn't used to be there. And you will see some less nice neighborhoods interspersed.
It's happening in advance of the Beltline transit in Atlanta. The Beltline has been building out park/trail and surrounding neighborhoods are doing very well. The light rail is currently just a promise.
I have seen this happen firsthand. It took a few years but the "rail line to nowhere" built near me around 5 years ago has giant housing complexes surrounding every station. It runs over capacity during rush hour now.
I assume this only happens in places where the roads are overloaded though
In Seattle at least, I would expect the implicit suggestion to upzone near a light rail station would be at least as important as greater land value from demand. I'm not sure how much a light rail station induces Seattle to upzone -- I've heard mixed reports.
The sad truth is that many cities around the world had light rail 50 years ago, they removed them saying that buses were much flexible and better and now they are bringing them back.
In places that kept them trolleys/street cars slowly morphed into light rail, some is separated from the road but much of it is still shared. The distinction isn't so cut and dry.
I find it infuriating that Renton asked for nothing in the ST3 bill, and Kirkland was swayed by a small group of activists into asking SoundTransit not to use the Cross Kirkland Corridor.
+1 on this. The Vienna transit system is so fantastic that I was able to get around the entire city without even speaking German. I remember one day I was riding the U-Bahn with a local friend and asked him what it was like during rush hour. He said, "this is rush hour". There was still plenty of space for people in all wagons. Simply amazing.
Seattle feels like numerous tangentially-connected villages, mostly based on how it was formed:
- Downtown's financial district and retail core, with the jail, hospitals, churches, and other services (like the methodone clinic and drunk tank) on First Hill.
- Capitol Hill's "crazy night life".
- Queen Anne Hill with normal-ish people.
- Magnolia's rich separation.
- Ballard the Scandinavian fishing village.
- Fremont and Wallingford - the artist and hippie communes, the University District, and Ravenna.
- The International District and The Jungle.
- Beacon Hill and Rainier Beach, where the action happens day or night.
- SoDo (Southern Downtown)'s industrial core.
- Lake City feels like the "northern SODO".
- West Seattle feeling closer to Seatac than Seattle.
A few of Seattle's neighborhoods seem to flow together, such as Wallingford and Ravenna being so overrrun with students that they feel like extensions of the University District. Others, like West Seattle, feel more like the small cities of White Center and Seatac that neighbor it.
That’s actually the ideal situation for a mass transit system. It ensures that passengers aren’t largely going in one direction in the morning, and in the opposite in the evening.
There's just no way to efficiently ship that many people on that route virtually simultaneously.
So many people finish work around the same times that you get this massive spike of people on the hour, and then it's dead quiet once that on-hour spike has been fulfilled. You don't want to be trying to get on the 545 at 5pm or 6pm. Shift your leaving time so you're at the bus stop 10-15 minutes earlier and it's a whole other story. Although I no longer do the 545 any more, for that, and for my current route I switched to arriving early in the office and leaving 4:30ish. I'm almost always guaranteed to get a seat and have less rush hour traffic slowing down my return home.
One thing that the city could do to help, and has helped elsewhere, is to encourage city businesses to shift their starting and finishing hours, especially those businesses that are a bit more regimented. This spreads out the peak over a bigger period of time and allows both more overall flow and less disruption.
ST 510 (Seattle - MLT - Everett, to reach Premera in MLT) was routinely 30+ minutes late, because buses would get stuck in traffic each way. So the common "2 buses at once" would occur. Or sometimes the 1st would be over-stuffed and the 2nd would be 5 minutes behind and almost empty.
MT 550 running 6 buses an hour felt the same in 2016 - packed in like a mosh pit during rush hour. That's when I gave in and bought a truck, and dealt with parking 6 blocks away instead of hiking 9 blocks down Cherry (and past the perpetual tent city) to the tunnel.
You do realize that by driving, you're making the problem worse? The real solution is to just get more cars off the road. There are few excuses to be driving alone in a city.
Clearly, stephengillie gave the bus a more-than-honest try. Having done so and finding that it simply didn't work for his needs, he doesn't deserve your criticism.
In my area, public transit is something that people who don't use it themselves love to criticize others for not using, either.
It's little used specifically because it is badly planned and operated with an eye toward political positioning, not serving would-be passengers.
No one is handing out boy scout patches for trying. I'd prefer we charge singular car commuters the actual price of their destructive habit but for now I will happily settle with shaming their antisocial behavior.
Guess what, the moment this nonsense becomes indefensible or plain too expensive is when that train or bus suddenly starts working and running on time.
You really have an axe to grind. You would obviously rather I bus to work than walk, which is absolute nonsense.
Please, regail us with tales of your bus ridership.
Do you enjoy being squished between people, unable to move? Do you like to "accidentally touch" people on the bus? Or do you get on the bus early and "silently judge" the people who have to stand? Do you pretend to read or work during the ride? (The bus bounces around too much to do any actual work, and that's if you can get a seat.) Or are you one of those annoying people that won't stop talking about Tuscany?
Have you been on a bus when it's had to pull over on the freeway, and turn itself off and on again, to "reboot the bus"? Ever wonder what state the bus has entered that it needs a reboot? What is the driver seeing, or not seeing? How many screens went blank and controls stopped working at highway speeds?
I wish this weren't the case, but I don't take the bus because it triples my commute. A trip that takes 25 minutes by car takes an hour and fifteen by bus for me. I test it every time I need to have my truck repaired.
It's because it's a reverse commute, and so while everyone is trying to get into the city I'm trying to get out. The bus would be pretty good if I lived south of Northgate and worked in the city.
Buses require a circuit to operate, unlike cars which can operate in single-vector mode. Thus, they can be impacted by seemly-non-systematic events such as distant traffic in the other direction.
It's got nothing to do with traffic delays. There are plenty of buses at each leg in my route. My specific problem is that I have to ride for 20 minutes in the opposite direction to get to a transit station where I then transfer to an express bus out to UW Bothell. But the bus from UW to my office isn't synchronized with the express bus so I either wait 15 minutes or walk a mile and a half across I-405.
On the other hand it's very efficient for getting in to the city, as I can hop on a single bus and be in Green Lake or the U district in about 15 minutes, and it's another 10 to cross the canal.
That is a fruitless battle. You are asking people to behave superrationally to escape a collective action problem. That's not how people work. People behave according to their individual self-interest. If it's faster or overall better (comfort, privacy, safety) for them to drive, they will drive.
Make transit better than driving and the problem will solve itself. People are rational.
When I worked downtown in SF, the options were clear. Take transit or deal with ridiculous traffic and costs of close to $600 a month.
Now that work south of SF, I can either take the company shuttle, which takes 40 min and if I miss it, I have to wait another hour. Or, drive my car which takes 20 min and I can arrive/leave whenever I please. Easy decision.
You can't fault people for making a rational choice.
"I can either take the company shuttle, which takes 40 min and if I miss it, I have to wait another hour. Or, drive my car which takes 20 min and I can arrive/leave whenever I please."
For people who can make full use of their time on the shuttle, driving is a 20-minute loss of productivity each way.
The value-math works differently for different people.
> For people who can make full use of their time on the shuttle, driving is a 20-minute loss of productivity each way.
If it's anything like the commuter buses, you can try to open your laptop on your lap with no elbow room, but the bus bounces too much to focus on what you're coding/reading. What you wind up doing is "work theater" where you appear to be working but aren't productive.
And that's if you can get a seat on the bus. For bus companies to make money, they have to pack in commuters like a mosh pit. And you're trapped there; a literal prisoner of the bus. Will the shuttle pull over if you need to step out for a moment?
The commuter routes subsidize all of the mostly-empty city buses that less-able people ride. (These are people who won't/can't walk/drive 6 blocks to the store.)
Most people who do this (taking the car) realize that (if we all take the bus, it would be a pretty smooth ride) - but first of all not all people CAN take the bus (mostly those coming from further away) and second, I can't fault them. If your commute is like 30mins by bus and 15mins by car... easy choice for ~22 days per month
A 30 minute bus commute sounds very optimistic. BART is the only system that has ever made me confident I won't waste 30 minutes before even being picked up.
I took the bus for about 2 years, mostly commuting from First Hill to Factoria. It's about an hour each way, if you don't miss the bus. If you do, it's more like 1.5 hours each way. MLT was an hour there and 2 hours back on the bus, plus a 30-minute hike before and after each way. Bellevue was an hour each way but I went to the gym between commute and work.
After driving for 6 months, I moved across the street from my workplace (literally). Since then, I've moved onto another job in Redmond, which is just 15 minutes down 520. And the traffic on that part of 520 is so good that half of the drivers go 70 until they reach Microsoft.
I lived in Seattle in 2011/2012; the bus was so bad that I bought my first car. So maybe it was worse before, but I did not find it a very good way to get around.
Seattle should look to a city like Vienna or Prague. The transportation systems are surprisingly well engineered but that might be due to the fact that a larger part of the population takes it.