It is obvious to realize the benefit in terms of labor savings by having multiple cars attached to each other and of having multiple wide doors for alight/board. However, I never put the two together to think about the benefit of having multiple cars stopping at a platform simultaneously: huge savings in alight/board times over multiple buses arriving sequentially. I think in a transit class we usually assumed a 15 second station/stop stand time for alight/board. If one train of 3 cars stops at a platform thats 15 seconds for its station stand time. But if 3 sequential buses stop at a platform, that’s 45 second station time.

If they could have spent the same money on rail, that could have been a better choice, but if that was their only way (and place) to spend their money, it was fine for the short term. Often the money just wouldn’t have been there for anything else.

With the DSTT, we did a conversion, and it’s better that they have the dedicated right of way to convert in the future than not have anything at all.

What Pittburgh has is sort of like the DSTT, only longer and lower-budget (it’s mostly at-grade, has shelters rather than stations, etc.) I think it was built in an old rail right-of-way.

I guess you could argue 3rd Avenue is a little like this, only 3rd Avenue kind of sucks (allowing cars on some stretches makes enforcement difficult, it’s already overcrowded with buses at rush hour, and the frequency of intersections makes the whole thing run pretty slowly).

Where do you want BRT to and from, Brad? I asked you a few days ago for your ideas, and you didn’t even mention BRT.

Obviously, from the point of view those along the right-of-way, this won’t be as nice as strict mainline LRT would be (boarding times, noise, diesel fumes, comfort, operations costs, etc. would be worse, though frequencies might be better) but the people beyond the right-of-way do get a quick, one-seat ride while the people in the right-of-way get fast, frequent service, so it seems like it might be an easier political sell than an LRT that seems too far away to use. Then again, people don’t like buses, and for obvious reasons.

Seattle Transit Blog has up an article laying out why rail makes the most sense for our major transit corridors over BRT technology. Check out the article here: Why BRT Doesn’t Make Sense

It is a good article and it lays out well the issues surroundi…

There is no magic bullet for Redmond Ridge. There is no magic bullet for Snohomish. There is no magic bullet for Orting. If you want rapid transit of *any kind* for these places, you’re looking at a lot of tax dollars – more per person the farther apart they live. That’s math – it’s not a matter of open-mindedness or solution-seeking, it’s simple, hard math that when two people live farther apart, it takes more road or more rail to connect them. Unfortunately, the people who tend to live that far from the city are the ones least likely to vote to tax themselves – the per person cost of connecting two next-door apartment buildings is a couple of orders of magnitude lower than the per person cost of connecting two houses on full lots.

If you have some better math, let’s hear it – but think about fuel prices, think about longevity, and think about cost per passenger mile. It costs well over a hundred dollars an hour to operate a bus – so when we’re looking at adding service hours to a route that commonly has sixty full seats and 30 people standing, and comparing that to a route that gets six riders per trip, where are we supposed to put our service? The trip with six riders doesn’t have six riders because it has low service – it has six riders because it’s in the middle of nowhere.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/20/AR2008062001345.html

Yes, this post has it all..

/sigh

really, you hit all the high points in one place – electrification vs diesel, boarding speed, operator-to-psgr ratio, dedicated row, equipment capex amortization vs buses, you name it.