Comment by kartickv

9 years ago

I'm not convinced that buses don't have the capacity trains do, when you consider that headway between trains is at least 90 seconds. If headway between buses is three seconds, in those 90 seconds, 30 buses can pass by. Assuming a bus has roughly the same capacity as a coach in a train, and that the train has 8 coaches, buses have roughly 4x the capacity.

Not to mention that buses can serve many routes that don't have enough capacity to merit a train, bus routes can be reconfigured without it taking years, and a bus system doesn't cost billions upon billions of dollars to build. Heck, even a single line of a metro system can cost a billion dollars to build.

If buses have dedicated panes where they don't have to interact with normal traffic they can easily hit 70mph. Australian highways in certain places have this system.

My favorite is Vancouver skytrain. While building highways they built a train track on pillars. It's fast and usually got me in and out of the city quicker than a car.

I imagine train tracks on pillars cost effective than underground tunnels. For a dense city it makes sense. Not for outskirts.