Comment by Johnny555
1 day ago
One advantage is that light rail encourages transit oriented development.
The fact that buses are so flexible and easily (and cheaply) rerouted makes developers less likely to build developments that rely on access to transit, but once a community spends a hundreds of millions of dollars on a light rail line, they know it's there for the long term.
There's been a ton of research on this and the conclusion has been that light rail does indeed attract more development than bus rapid transit, but that there is no net gain in development across an urban area. It just shifts development to the corridor in question. There's a reason the overwhelming majority of transportation engineers favor bus rapid transit. On the other hand, I personally prefer to ride in light rail and I think many people would agree. So there's a reason that many urban planners prefer light rail.
That's sort of the popular wisdom, but rails don't guarantee it will be there for the long run. DC recently announced that they're replacing their light rail with buses:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/27/steetcar-...
Jarrett Walker has a good piece about it: https://humantransit.org/2025/05/what-was-wrong-with-the-was...
I agree with him that in order to endure and justify a permanent operating subsidy a transit service needs to be useful and used by many people. Most American light rail doesn't meet that bar.
Interesting piece, thanks. I also enjoyed his piece "Streetcars: An Inconvenient Truth." His argument is based on length, speed and cost; the main point is that a technically equivalent bus would often be cheaper and thus could be run on a longer, more useful route. If you look at the hundreds of millions spent on DC Streetcar and its limited utility, this all starts to look quite obvious. So why did we do it?
I think there is another aspect that usually goes unstated, which is the vibes. If you're a mayor you want to build a tram. If you're a tourist you want to ride a tram. If you're a prospective resident you want to live near a tram. Yes, it's smoother and yadda yadda, but really it's because it has more sex appeal. A technically equivalent bus may well be _technically_ equivalent but could never be truly equivalent. Nobody would write a play entitled A Technically Equivalent Bus Named Desire. In a way, spending money on a tram is similar to spending money on parks or flowers or public art. And so we will spend the money; and we will build the streetcar; and damn the technical equivalence.
I wonder what the world would be like if we were honest with ourselves.
I never heard of the (Washington, D.C.) DC Streetcar until this comment.
Wiki tells me:
Is it even worth building a rail project that short? I had less than 900K riders last year. Something about light rail is so underwhelming to me.
I've seen that claim, but places that run good bus service for decades see plenty of transit oriented development. (most of those places also have subways though. The other options seems to bad bus service which won't get transit oriented development but bad service is enough to explain why)
As a city grows, it's common for the transit system to evolve from direct bus routes to trunk lines supported by local buses. Maybe there was a good bus service to the city center when you bought your home. But now the buses only go to the nearest transit hub, because there is no space for all the buses in the city center anymore. While the average quality of transit may have improved, your services are slower and less convenient than they used to be.
You and I are well aligned on a lot of things - but in general, buses do not result in TOD. There are some exceptions, but they are very much exceptional. Trains generally do result in TOD because the people pushing for TOD get to try over and over again.
That's sad but I can see that. Maybe more with train and metro stations though than light rail that often makes little difference to commute times vs a bus.