To cut to the chase, if an area doesn’t need a redevelopment boost then such benefits should not be included in the cost analysis. Specifically Bell-Red does not need a boost to create a new east/west arterial (the 15/16th road that piggy backs on Link). Love him or hate him, as Conrad said, Bellevue is capable of funding what it needs with respect to development potential. And where North sub-area equity may come predominantly from Seattle that’s certainly not the case in on the eastside with regards to Bellevue.

The price of oil is, long-term, continuously increasing in real terms and has been since the 1980s, despite occasional spikes and drops.

The most efficient oil-burning engines today are *ELECTRIC ENGINES* with diesel generators attached. This will continue — gasoline engines are a dying technology which is making no progress, diesel-mechanical engines are pretty much maxed out, and electric transmissions and motors are improving.

But diesel-electric involves dragging around a big diesel generator and a bunch of fuel with the vehicle. After a certain vehicle frequency, it becomes more efficient to put up overhead wires. It’s not yet efficient for the 30 movements a day over thousands of miles which you see on long-distance freight lines. For a service running multiple times per hour over within-city distances, it is already more cost-effective.

And Seattle *already has trolleybuses*, so you should know this! Unfortunately, trolleybuses are not currently easily available in mass production (therefore more expensive than they should be) — electric *rail* vehicles, however, are readily available in mass production.

people arriving by plane (!) are likely to have made their travel plans before the rail line even existed.

How far in advance do you make plane reservations?

Regarding cost, underground bus tunnels will easily cost more $$$ than underground rail (ventilation requirements).

Really? Rails (that weren’t buried), electrical substations, signaling, none of that would have made the original DSTT more expensive… oh wait, the buses were running on electricity.

systems must be built to cater to peak loads in order to function.

Thank you, this is exactly why a rail system built to meet peak demand is a folly. Buses scale far better to serve peak demand than rail ever can. You have to have consistent ridership at least 8-12 hours a day before rail starts to break even.

No, not always. As a matter of fact, if you have a traffic jam, you literally cannot add capacity by adding a bus. You just add one more very-slow-moving vehicle to the

If you think a high-capacity, high-frequency route isn’t needed from downtown across the Lake, [ad-hominem]. If you think you can provide that without rail, you’re doubly [ad-hominem]. If you think the FTA’s Bush-era “cost-effectiveness” rating is actually a cost-effectiveness rating, you’re triply [ad-hominem].

The fact that you believe in “robocars” renders you a special, industrial-grade [ad-hominem]. We can already build automated trains. We will not be able to build automated cars at reasonable prices for probably 100 years, or optimistically at least 50 more — they’ve been trying since the 1950s, and the technical problems are insurmountable. Too much hard-to-program pattern detection needed — which isn’t needed on rails….

The solution is for bus “A”, on seeing bus “B” in the driver’s rearview mirror, to bypass stops with waiting passengers (they’ll be picked up on-time by the trailing ‘follower’) and drop-off only

This isn’t a solution. With a typical decently-designed busy not-just-commuter bus line, bus “A” will stop at every single stop to discharge passengers. As such it will remain behind schedule. Sure, the passengers will be spread out among two buses eventually, but the fact is that the headways will remain busted — the time between bus Z and bus A is permanently doubled.

Yes, this can happen with trains. Rarely, because there’s little or no SOV interference.

I suppose if you’re running a pure commuter line with one-way traffic you can get a chance to skip stops; but if you’re running a line with *any* significant traffic in the contra-peak direction, you don’t. Surprise surprise, the most popular routes to put mass transit on rail on *do* have reverse-peak traffic.

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Regarding cost, underground bus tunnels will easily cost more $$$ than underground rail (ventilation requirements). Almost all of the cost is in the civil engineering for any mass transportation system.

So if you want to argue that surface-running buses using existing asphalt are better than light rail, great, but the voters of the Sound Transit area disagree with you. If you want to argue that comparably grade-separated buses are cheaper than light rail, *you are just wrong*.

Of course, a lot of “rail rapid transit” doesn’t really qualify as rapid transit either. Mostly we’re talking about “mass transportation”, and not really “rapid transit”. Sure, the IRT in New York was “rapid” when it was built — by comparison with HORSES.

….Therefore, more costs EVERY SINGLE YEAR for bus service vs. the huge *money savings* of train service.

I love how bus fanatics think that money is no object and we can afford to just pour money into diesel buses forever. Actually I suspect some of them don’t think this and just advocate buses for the purpose of killing buses and getting nothing but cars.