From: fuzzface@cats.ucsc.edu (Aaron Priven)
Newsgroups: ba.transportation
Subject: Re: Pro-rail bias in Adrian's transit
Date: 28 Aug 1992 07:56:27 GMT
Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz (College Eight)
NNTP-Posting-Host: am.ucsc.edu


Some things seem to be ignored in this incipient busway vs rail 
debate: 
 
   (1) Rail has higher capacity than buses.
 
   (2) Busways when done right are much like light rail routes; 
they are fixed, have stations along their length, and so on.  
What makes buses unattractive versus rail is the fact that 
they're SLOWER than traffic when you count bus stops, because 
they have to travel in traffic.  A dedicated busway means this 
isn't true.
 
   (3) It's complicated to run diesel buses underground because of the
exhaust problem.  Electric buses, of course, eliminate the problem.
Seattle's underground busway uses electric and I believe dual-mode
buses.

   I don't see why you couldn't combine a busway and a light rail line
along roughly the same ROW, if the right of way was paved anyway and
entry to the LRVs wasn't on platforms but was at street level.  (The
N-Judah ROW from 9th to 19th in San Francisco, for example, or the
transit mall in downtown San Jose [if I recall correctly].)  You'd have
to make room at stations for bus expresses, but it could be done.  In
fact there are rails in Seattle's downtown underground busway, but I
think they weren't intended to be used at the same time as buses.

   I think busways have the great advantage of providing one- stop
service between feeder routes and downtown.  I think increasingly
"downtown" is ceasing to have any meaning in the Bay Area, and that we
need to stop developing transit reactively, and start developing it
actively: put new urban growth around transit instead of building so
that no other transportation but the automobile is feasible.  (The kind
of "transit villages" that was on the front page of the Oakland Tribune
on Sunday is a start.)  That kind of transit-based growth will require
high capacities, higher I suspect than the threshold between when
busways are economical and when rail is economical.

   To quote my hardware salesman, the right tool for the right job.

In article <=#cnj1l.loren@netcom.com> loren@netcom.com (Loren Hart)
writes:

>  1)  The route is perminant, and some traffic engineer or worse yet,
>some buracrat can not easily decide to re-route the rail >system, as
they do with buses, thus making a location that was >once easy to
reach, more difficult to reach.

I think this has been pointed out already, but we're talking about
busways with dedicated rights-of-way -- no other traffic, with
stations, etc.  The difference between a busway and a light rail route
is that there are no rails on a busway and that busways have exits so
that feeder buses can enter and exit them.

>I am not a "rail fan" as it were, I am just a person that needs to get
>from one place to another.

"Fans" of any time worry me.  I want to see better transit because I
think the environment is being hurt by cars, both by pollution and by
land development that the car enables to take much more of the land
than it needs to form a livable community, wiping out wilderness,
farms, and so on.  I don't care if transit is buses or light rail or
heavy rail or gondolas or zeppelins, as long as it can provide a useful
transportation service to the Bay Area.

 =Aaron=

-- 
Aaron Priven, aaronrp@ucscb.ucsc.edu or fuzzface@cats.ucsc.edu
  Bring in the workers, and bring up the rails;
  We're gonna lay down the tracks, and tear up the trails. 
  Open her heart, let the life-blood flow,
  Gotta get on our way 'cause we're movin' too slow.
    -- Gordon Lightfoot, "Canadian Railroad Trilogy"