Bus Rapid Transit

**fryar** · September-23-10, 10:07 PM

Originally Posted by Jason

Also, since development tends to cluster around light rail stops, its ridership is actually reinforcing. Businesses locate near the stops, which increases ridership, which makes the stations more attractive to businesses. More businesses are set up and it increases ridership more. This makes the system a lot more efficient and user friendly, since over time, more and more of people's destinations are concentrated along the route.

Well, this is surely a rehashing of many years' worth of back and forth on DY, but: What you say is true. FWIW, you could have at least some semi-permanence by making adjustments to the street, as in the picture shown above.

With both alternatives, light rail and BRT, it is critical to put all of the pieces into place, and not forget to connect the friggin' component that makes it work.

Clearly, nobody who a) made the call to send some crews to those lights and add some new components or b) who worked on those installations and understood the bigger picture of what they were doing actually took an hour to ride the dang bus and see if everything was working in concert.

Who don't we all just perfunctorily perform our assigned functions, collect our paychecks, and go home. Gnnnaaaaaargh! I'm starting a thread on why job performance measuring metrics are meaningless. Because I'm mad, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!

No, but seriously, here we are spinning our wheels on BRT merits, and our reference point is sleeping on the job. What idiots.

**JBMcB** · September-23-10, 10:08 PM

Originally Posted by Jason

Business decisions aren't made based on bus stops, so the development benefits from light rail don't happen. The permanence of light rail is actually a good thing.

Again, it depends on your reason for starting a mass transit system to begin with. If you are trying to enact some sort of social change, a light rail system does make sense. However, it's going to be a gamble, and an expensive gamble at that. If you take out a hundred million in building bonds to get it done, and ridership doesn't take off, you're saddled with the expenses and an underutilized railroad.

If your purpose in having mass transit is to move people where they need to go as cheaply and efficiently as possible, right now, a bus system is the way to go. It's relatively cheap, you can play with the routes easily, and if ridership declines you can sell off unused buses.

After a few years of use, if a particular bus run seems very popular, light rail can be looked into for that run. This way, instead of telling people where they need to go, you can find out where they want to go and respond to their needs.

Bearinabox · September-23-10, 11:45 PM

Originally Posted by JBMcB

Again, it depends on your reason for starting a mass transit system to begin with. If you are trying to enact some sort of social change, a light rail system does make sense. However, it's going to be a gamble, and an expensive gamble at that. If you take out a hundred million in building bonds to get it done, and ridership doesn't take off, you're saddled with the expenses and an underutilized railroad.

If your purpose in having mass transit is to move people where they need to go as cheaply and efficiently as possible, right now, a bus system is the way to go. It's relatively cheap, you can play with the routes easily, and if ridership declines you can sell off unused buses.

After a few years of use, if a particular bus run seems very popular, light rail can be looked into for that run. This way, instead of telling people where they need to go, you can find out where they want to go and respond to their needs.

I need to stop clicking on these transit threads. You realize we already have a bus system here, it may be cheap but it certainly isn't efficient, and we already know exactly which routes are and aren't popular?

**Hermod** · September-24-10, 05:15 AM

Originally Posted by ghettopalmetto

Yet we're supposed to believe that far-more-expensive freeways are moveable???

[[Have you ever noticed that the New York City Subway is over 100 years old, yet New York hasn't experienced the same "evolving traffic patterns" that places like Los Angeles and Atlanta have???)

Which one is the chicken and which one is the egg?

Do you think Henry Huntington built the Pacific Electric Railway in Los Angeles fearing that traffic patterns might "evolve" in the future?

New York has built-in natural geographic bottlenecks that restrain access to the city. In an area with every route pretty much open, traffic finds "work arounds" unless these are closed off by law enforcement or construction.

**ghettopalmetto** · September-24-10, 07:38 AM

Hmmmmm. Litanies of excuses, yet people wonder why Detroit languishes.

**iheartthed** · September-24-10, 10:16 AM

Originally Posted by Hermod

New York has built-in natural geographic bottlenecks that restrain access to the city. In an area with every route pretty much open, traffic finds "work arounds" unless these are closed off by law enforcement or construction.

What about Chicago? Their terrain is virtually identical to Detroit...

**bailey** · September-24-10, 10:37 AM

Originally Posted by ghettopalmetto

Hmmmmm. Litanies of excuses, yet people wonder why Detroit languishes.

One would actually have to have a plan for which one makes excuses as to how it can't be done...in order to make a litany of excuses. As it stands now, Detroit [[and only detroit because nothing goes north of 8 mile) has only a plan to make a plan. The only concrete decision made seems to be that it will be on woodward. What mode it is, how many stops, how it's oriented in traffic, where on woodward it's placed...all completely undecided. After a few more years of study and town hall meetings, and internet voting, there might actually be a plan to make excuses about. Even then it's only a plan to expend hundreds of millions of dollars to put in a train on one thoroughfare, running along side buses serving the same route, and doesn't leave the city.

**JBMcB** · September-24-10, 11:54 AM

Originally Posted by Bearinabox

You realize we already have a bus system here, it may be cheap but it certainly isn't efficient, and we already know exactly which routes are and aren't popular?

It's a broken bus system, the city system doesn't link to the suburbs. Fix that, and you can start to see which are the high traffic routes. Get shuttle services running on the busiest of those, and you can start getting good data if you want to do a light rail system.

**Hermod** · September-24-10, 02:46 PM

Originally Posted by iheartthed

What about Chicago? Their terrain is virtually identical to Detroit...

Chicago was a very major [[make that THE major) rail hub in the US. Chicago had major commuter service on several of the rail lines entering Chicago. Chicago also had three very large interurban lines which ran on their own right-of-way [[CNS&M, CSS&SB, and CA&E) that survived into the 1960s. Chicago did not have a city government that did everything in its power to bankrupt the interurban lines raditing out into the countryside. Light rail up Woodward from Downtown to Pontiac? We had it. Light rail out Gratiot to Mt Clemens and Port Huron? We had it. Light rail out Grand River to Farmington? We had it. James Couzzens sabotaged it all because of his hatred for the streetcar and interurban companies.

.

.

**iheartthed** · September-24-10, 03:05 PM

Originally Posted by Hermod

Chicago was a very major [[make that THE major) rail hub in the US. Chicago had major commuter service on several of the rail lines entering Chicago. Chicago also had three very large interurban lines which ran on their own right-of-way [[CNS&M, CSS&SB, and CA&E) that survived into the 1960s. Chicago did not have a city government that did everything in its power to bankrupt the interurban lines raditing out into the countryside. Light rail up Woodward from Downtown to Pontiac? We had it. Light rail out Gratiot to Mt Clemens and Port Huron? We had it. Light rail out Grand River to Farmington? We had it. James Couzzens sabotaged it all because of his hatred for the streetcar and interurban companies.

So we have common ground. It's not that Detroit could not and cannot support it. It's that it was artificially obsoleted. That's the difference between Detroit and Chicago, or Detroit and New York.

New York could have shoe-horned a car-dependent environment onto its residents like Detroit. In fact, some leaders [[Robert Moses) tried to do just that but weren't able to follow through on it.

**fryar** · September-24-10, 03:23 PM

Originally Posted by iheartthed

New York could have shoe-horned a car-dependent environment onto its residents like Detroit. In fact, some leaders [[Robert Moses) tried to do just that but weren't able to follow through on it.

You ever notice the 495 signs on 34th Street? That cantankerous old man got pretty far with his plans to dice and slice highways through New York, including an official federal interstate designation for the planned highway connecting the Midtown Tunnel and the Long Island Expressway with the Lincoln Tunnel and the NJ Turnpike.

I still like both BRT and light rail. As long as you can connect downtown and midtown efficiently and quickly, I am all for it.

**iheartthed** · September-24-10, 03:50 PM

Originally Posted by fryar

You ever notice the 495 signs on 34th Street? That cantankerous old man got pretty far with his plans to dice and slice highways through New York, including an official federal interstate designation for the planned highway connecting the Midtown Tunnel and the Long Island Expressway with the Lincoln Tunnel and the NJ Turnpike.

I still like both BRT and light rail. As long as you can connect downtown and midtown efficiently and quickly, I am all for it.

I never paid attention to it, but it makes sense that that was the plan since both tunnels terminate near 34th St.

What really stopped him, and likely saved Manhattan, was the resistance to the lower Manhattan expressway that would have leveled Greenwich Village, Soho and Chinatown. Now, 50 years later, what would have been demolished for the freeway is some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. Makes you wonder what might have been for the Paradise Valleys and Chinatowns buldozed to build I-75...

**Hermod** · September-25-10, 05:06 AM

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I never paid attention to it, but it makes sense that that was the plan since both tunnels terminate near 34th St.

What really stopped him, and likely saved Manhattan, was the resistance to the lower Manhattan expressway that would have leveled Greenwich Village, Soho and Chinatown. Now, 50 years later, what would have been demolished for the freeway is some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. Makes you wonder what might have been for the Paradise Valleys and Chinatowns buldozed to build I-75...

New York City and Washington DC have major anchors to their downtowns with the financial district and the federal government.

What was in downtown Detroit was just too easy to replicate elsewhere [[shopping, medical offices, law offices)..

**iheartthed** · September-25-10, 10:24 AM

Originally Posted by Hermod

What was in downtown Detroit was just too easy to replicate elsewhere [[shopping, medical offices, law offices)..

So what you're saying is that downtown Detroit was just like Midtown Manhattan...

**mwilbert** · September-25-10, 11:06 AM

So what you're saying is that downtown Detroit was just like Midtown Manhattan...

I don't think so--Midtown had a number of other hard-to-shift anchors--advertising industry, corporate headquarters, Broadway come to mind. Also lots of people live really close to Midtown, generating a natural demand for shopping and other amenities, while historically downtown Detroit was not residential. There are more people living in Downtown Detroit* now than there have been in the past 50 years, and probably in the past 100, but not enough to make up for the reduced number of people who work there.

I don't think people should look for single causes of complicated problems.. Detroit's core was certainly not helped by the excessive construction of freeways, but that was only one small part of its decline, and I don't see how Manhattan would have been destroyed if there were more freeways there. No doubt it is better off without them though.

*The truth of this statement depends upon how you delineate downtown, of course.

**Hermod** · September-25-10, 11:07 AM

Originally Posted by iheartthed

So what you're saying is that downtown Detroit was just like Midtown Manhattan...

Downtown Detroit just didn't have anything essential to make it necessary for people to go there [[other than the City-County Building). When I worked downtown in 1961, you could already see the place emptying out. Downtown exists today only because Henry the Deuce built Ren Cen and arm-twisted all of the folks who did business with Ford to put an office in there. Can you imagine downtown today without Ren Cen and GM HQ out in Macomb County?

**iheartthed** · September-25-10, 01:33 PM

Come on guys, we're doing a bit of tail chasing here. There was no more of a need for most of New York's industries to maintain a presence in Manhattan than there was Detroit's to stay downtown... Other than New York leadership realizing early on that bleeding the city dry probably wasn't such a great idea.

**stasu1213** · September-26-10, 10:23 AM

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I never paid attention to it, but it makes sense that that was the plan since both tunnels terminate near 34th St.

What really stopped him, and likely saved Manhattan, was the resistance to the lower Manhattan expressway that would have leveled Greenwich Village, Soho and Chinatown. Now, 50 years later, what would have been demolished for the freeway is some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. Makes you wonder what might have been for the Paradise Valleys and Chinatowns buldozed to build I-75...

The big three had a bigger influence on Detroit's political leaders during that era such as they do with the political leaders now. The groundbreaking of the light rail from Jefferson to New Center area up Woodward had not happened. I had said last year when news had broken about the ground breaking for 2010 I had said that it is not going to happen. This ball will continue to be kicked back and forth until you get the bought and paid for leaders out of Detroit's city government.

**Hermod** · September-26-10, 10:34 AM

Originally Posted by stasu1213

The big three had a bigger influence on Detroit's political leaders during that era such as they do with the political leaders now. The groundbreaking of the light rail from Jefferson to New Center area up Woodward had not happened. I had said last year when news had broken about the ground breaking for 2010 I had said that it is not going to happen. This ball will continue to be kicked back and forth until you get the bought and paid for leaders out of Detroit's city government.

No, political hostility toward public transit companies on the part of the government of the City of Detroit began with the first horse car lines before there ever was a gasoline engine. Detroit [[government and newspapers) did everything they could in the way of restrictive franchises, threats of franchise revocation, and anti-business propaganda to demonize and destroy entreprenurial mass transit. Streetcar line and interurban lines ran of a very thin profit margin and it was easy for Detroit to push them into bankruptcy. The only thing the Big 3 did to Detroit mass transit was to build cars as competition for riders and to offer the old DSR good deals on buses.