Lyndon Henry of Railway Age speaks out on the amazing growth in recent LRT deployments across the country and their ability to out acquire new riders over the BRT alternative. But he also highlights some red flags in BRT assessments.
http://www.railwayage.com/index.php/blogs/lyndon-henry/research-study-lrt-ridership-gains-really-spectacular.html?channel= (http://www.railwayage.com/index.php/blogs/lyndon-henry/research-study-lrt-ridership-gains-really-spectacular.html?channel=)
Where electric LRT really excelled was in achieving ridership goals. On average, LRT projects seemed to meet their ridership targets at about twice the rate of the BRT projects, using the "ridership achievement index" we developed for the study (which accounted for the pace at which projected ridership was being achieved).
But some of the LRT results were really spectacular. St. Louis's St. Clair Extension of Metrolink, for example, was racing towards its ridership goals at over 7 times the predicted rate; Minneapolis's Hiawatha line (pictured above) at six times; and Denver's Southwest LRT at more than 6 times. (It should be noted that three out of the 20 LRT projects studied were failing to meet projected growth rate targets; nevertheless, the overall LRT average still exceeded BRT's. Also, the Sprinter DMU project failed to meet its growth rate target.)
It should be noted that some BRT projects didn't do so badly â€" Cleveland's "HealthLine" project (Euclid Avenue) was achieving its target at a 60% faster pace than expected, while Los Angeles's Orange Line busway was reaching its ridership at nearly 3 times the projected rate.
But the biggest problems we encountered involved BRT projects. For example, ridership targets (if any) are rarely revealed publicly. Furthermore, BRT project ridership and O&M costs are typically blended with systemwide bus data, making it impossible to readily scrutinize the BRT project.
Federal Transit Administration (FTA) policy seemed at least partly culpable. We noted a huge disparity between the FTA's relatively rigorous scrutiny of LRT projects vs. the comparatively facile approval of new BRT starts, which mostly seemed to be just "waved through" the approval process and handed funding, typically 80% of the total.
shocking!
Yeah, nothing surprising here. Oh, and the two better BRT projects mentioned cost over $25 million per mile. They are completely different animals from our local project, which is what most would refer to as regular, reliable local bus service. Cleveland's Health Line is a complete streets project that includes dedicated bus lanes for the transit mode. Its got wide sidewalks, bike lanes, pedestrian refuges at intersections, landscaped medians, and fiber optics, etc.
Exactly Lake, this is what we've been preaching all along. To me the more interesting part of this series is the economic studies that are increasingly showing the massive BRT projects to be more expensive over the life of the project then rail would have been. This rather blows away the argument that we once heard in a local public dog and pony show, "We'll build the BRT and when enough riders show up we'll just throw some rails under it and you'll have a train."