Bleh. There really are very few good examples of BRT being worth it. Try Adelaide — where the only reason BRT seems to be worth it is that it can share the roadway over a single bridge and its approaches.

I would love to write more about BRT on this blog when I have time one day. There are some definate misconceptions going on here already. Unless you’ve been to someplace like Ottawa, you haven’t seen the power of BRT. Buses do not get stuck in traffic if they truly have exclusive right-of-way. The argument should never be LRT versus BRT overall. It is a decision transit planners should make between all possible transit modes specific to the corridor at hand.

BRT works best when you build an exclusive transit corridor into a city and allow it to enter the downtown keeping that priority (such as in the bus tunnel here). However, unlike LRT, you can save construction money by only building the exclusive corridor where the congestion exists. Once the buses reach the edge of congestion, they can travel on any roadway and no rails need to be built. It is perfect for communities that value a single seat ride into downtown (AKA I hate to transfer). LRT can only provide a single seat ride for people who live within a mile of the station. In a place like Seattle, a mile from the station covers a pretty big portion of the population. Outside Seattle or in cities like LA or Houston, it doesn’t cover much.

A slightly more jaundiced view notes that railways in developing countries are either imperialistic, that is to say, funded by outside investors and built to serve the interests of the outside investors rather than the interests of the country, or socialistic, that is to say, owned and built by the government to serve the nation.

This can be easy to see on a map, where most of the ‘imperialist’ railways run from a mine to a port, for example, but there is no lateral line that runs the length of the country (and often no coordination between the small lines running from producer to export shipping).

Well, actually, you just need to know more about how the IMF/World Bank acted, and how that played out with the dictators we supported in South America in the 70s and 80s, the debt load of the developing nations, and the eventual bankruptcy of the nations and refutation of their outstanding IMF/World Bank obligations. Too many moving parts here for me to put it together for you here.

But basically the answer is yes, the IMF was idealogically opposed to government-owned railroad systems (and eventually, in their final insanity, even opposed to government-owned water systems), and when the city of Curitabo planned to build a rail transit line the IMF said if they did that, the IMF would pull other loans outstanding in Brazil and destroy the Brazilian economy

Steel on steel rail is substantially less energy intensive per passenger mile than rubber-tired buses.

And maglev is more effient than steel on steel but doesn’t make rail obsolete. Rail is more cost effective per passenger mile only if the demand exceeds the threshold of what can be provide by a bus. It’s more expensive to build and more expensive per hour to operate than a bus. Rail has it’s place, buses will always have far more places.

I rode buses in Duesseldorf and suburbs in 1998. The stops did have names, which seemed kind of pretentious. The stops were wider than Metro’s every other block, but may not be that different than Metro’s new standard. The driver did not seem to collect fares. I had a weekly pass so I didn’t have to deal with daily fares. My friend who was living there (but not German) insisted we get on and off at the back door. I assumed it was to avoid giving the driver an opportunity to scrutinize us about our fares, but other people used the front door too so I’m not sure. The buses ran on regular streets and the Autobahn. The streets were widely spaced and not congested, but I assume that was that particular suburb and not a transit-mitigation measure.

At first I was turned off by the 1950s suburban newness of everything. Then I realized Duesseldorf had been leveled in the war and had to rebuild from scratch, and naturally followed the contemporary style of the time. This is not to say there were single-family houses everywhere because Germany isn’t like that. Our apartment was a block from the Duesseldorf bus and a ten-minute walk from the cross-suburb and airport bus. Bus service was every half hour, and it took half an hour to get to the suburban center or S-bahn station. Good by US standards but I’d want a better location if I lived there. Those lucky enough to live near an S-bahn station had 24 hour service that was faster than the bus.

I was amused that there was nobody doing 130 mph on the Autobahn. It was congested at rush hour just like in the US, so the fastest people could go was 40 or so. There were no HOV lanes in that area so the bus went in regular traffic. There was an S-bahn station along the way (3 stops from downtown), but it was on the Duesseldorf side of the freeway so we couldn’t avoid the freeway. The train and bus both left Duesseldorf at the same time from adjacent stations, but the train got to the station several minutes before the bus, so I prefered to take the train three stops and transfer. My friend prefered to take the bus all the way, which I found boring.

Not sure about about the IMF forcing Curitabo to choose buses. I thought Curitabo chose buses itself as a cost-cutting measure (i.e., the upfront capital costs). Can anyone else confirm this comment about the IMF?

And what was the IMF’s motivation? Blindly looking at upfront costs? Controlled by rabid bus enthusiasts? Ties to the oil companies?

Secondly, yes, Curitabo is an illustration of this problem. They intended to build a rail transit system, but the IMF/World Bank blackmailed them into using buses by threatening to pull other loans that were outstanding in Brazil. Now the busways run bumper-to-bumper in rush hour, losing money and polluting the city. Of course, in that example the ridership was there from the beginning, rather than moving to the line, but the principle is the same- you lose money carrying bus passengers, and the more passengers you carry, the more money you lose.

And, BTW, Brazil did go broke following the advice of the IMF/World Bank and paying the interest on projects the IMF insisted on that never worked out as well as they were supposed to. Maybe if they had ignored the IMF and built the rail lines they already had the ridership for they would have lost less money.

You have to put the steel in the roadway to support the weight of the buses and you have to hang wire to make them electric. You might as well use the steel in the form of rails and get the advantages of rail transit.

And, wake up and smell the coffee, Bernie. The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones and the oil age won’t end because we run out of oil. But rising world demand makes $200/bbl oil almost a certainty within five years. There’s nothing “sudden” about this change- everyone in the industry knows we’re in peak oil already. The “sudden” part is when you try to make in a few years the changes you should have made in the previous decades.

Most of us learned in college that you can’t get good grades by only studying the night before the final. Well, guess what, real life is like that too.