Comment by sofixa

If the bus is using "free" roads, then it's forced to compete for space with general traffic and likely to perform far worse than BRT or trains that don't have to do this. Worse performance/speed/frequency => lower ridership => worse profitability => calls to cancel the "wasteful" bus etc.

The only way out IMO is that we have to stop ripping off the public by giving away unlimited road space for free.

> I've yet to see a convincing argument that trains are cheaper than busses (especially when you consider that most of a bus's route (in the USA) would be on "free" roads).

For a given capacity requirement, in a dense city, they're cheaper. The biggest costs of an urban train line are 1) building stations on expensive land 2) driver salaries, and buses are worse on both aspects; you need much more station space to load/unload the same number of people from buses than from trains, and buses carry far fewer passengers per driver.

> If they weren't why would BRT exist at all?

As far as I can tell BRT is a spook, a way for the road lobby to stop cities building rail. Has it ever actually worked out well for passengers?

Bus lifespan is 15-20 years max and needs tons of maintenance during that time. Trains last 40 years and go 100,000 miles+ between failures.

Trains are a bigger upfront investment, but are cheaper in the long run, especially once capacity is factored in. You need a lot of busses to equal moderate sized trains.

Busses have their place, but not as the backbone for rapid transit in even moderate sized urban areas.

BRT trades CAPX for OPEX. In Latin America where BRT is hugely successful capital is expensive and labour is cheap, so hiring a ton of drivers is easy. In high labour costs markets like the US, Canada, and Europe BRT falls apart. It's often all transit agencies think they can get funding and support for so it's pushed, but it's way too easy to cut back BRT attributes like signal priority, dedicated lanes, and all door boarding to end up with just a bus with a fancy livery.

The key benefit of BRT is that they have a dedicated right-of-way without conflicts with other traffic just like train tracks with full grade separation. So to do that, BRT suddenly no longer has free roads. You now need dedicated BRT-only roads.

This is not really true. There are absolutely things in the rail system that are as “mass produced” as roads are. Railway platforms for example are a highly standardised form that has many other applications (loading and inspection bays, walkways etc.), trains are actually not only mass produced (e.g. by Bombardier) but are actually leased by their operators in Europe; there are five or six, I think, main ROSCOs —- rolling stock companies —- in the UK for example.

There is a notable exception that might distort techie perception on this issue: BART. It implements many of its own standards, even down to track gauge. But it is absolutely an outlier (standardised track gauge, ironically, being the USA’s main contribution to the development of the railways, which it was otherwise late to).

Almost everywhere else has rather interchangeable infrastructure and a lot of trans-national businesses.

There are off the shelf trains, tracks, and stations already. It's one of the key ways many european and asian operators deliver tons of transit for the dollar.