Suspicious of what? you’re lack of knowledge? Look at the Central Corridor in Minnesota. BRT with a dedicated right of way versus LRT and it was 1/3 of the cost. Buying land, building a tunnel at the UofM, proper stops/stations and such.

As for ride quality, the problem is how one evaluates quality. Note that I was speaking to the overall experience not being dependent on the mode. You on the other hand argue that what matters for quality of ride is how much of a bump a rider feels. That’ snot true at all. People want comfortable seating. They don’t want to rub knees with strangers. And rail itself isn’t exactly a pleasant ride. yes, there aren’t “bumps”. instead of minor bumps, one has to deal with the vehicles occasionally swaying from side to side.

But the real problem is that in the transit world is that those of us who realize money doesn’t grow on trees and that the most good can come out of getting the most people taking trips on transit – any type of transit – get branded as some sort of “deniers” and people wanting to undermine transit. However, I fail to see how being able to have twice as many trips occur on transit with the same amount of money spent undermines it.

- Delay the rest.

The southern extensions seem nice but have poor return on investment and should be delayed, especially since those areas already have *some* rail service.

The Northwest Corridor has suffered severe planning problems, with the bizarre overlapping BRT, is a ‘mode orphan’ using diesel, seems to be trying to do multiple things at once, and needs to be looked at more carefully. The North Metro corridor is expected to serve the fewest people.

And yet those in the north will be benefited if the EMU infrastructure for the Gold Line and East Corridor is built.

The claims of lesser ride quality is a lie. That depends on how the agency configures the cars and buses; it is not about the mode itself

BS. While you are correct that vehicle configuration plays a big part–a nice luxurious chartered motor coach is infinitely more comfortable than, say, one of the trams in Amsterdam (for those who have never been their, the streetcars there are narrow, decades-old, rickety, bone-jarring buckets of bolts–I’ve been on more comfortable hayrides). And some factors ascribed as an advantage for rail (not pulling to the curb to pick up stops) aren’t really inherent in the technology. However, rails prevent a much smoother surface than does pavement (where one finds things like displaced chunks of road, potholes, speed bumps, non-level grading for drainage purposes); and the need for vehicle suspensions to accomodate this produces a bumpy ride. The fact that rail vehicles are capable of being larger and heavier also contributes to ride quality. Holding everything else equal, a train is going to be more comfortable than a bus.

The principle advantages of a bus, including BRT, are a) it is not tied to specialized infrastructure, making open configurations possible (generic bus services that use busways to expedite sections of the route), and b) busses can enter mixed traffic to get through “difficult” spots, like fully-developed urban fabric or waterways, or such.

But when you make silly claims like a typical 3x cost savings for dedicated-ROW BRT (rails and catenary aren’t significantly more expensive than pavement, so this doesn’t even begin to pass the smell test–source?), or that rail’s claim to superior ride quality is a “lie”–it makes me suspicious. That sort of argument isn’t made by informed transit advocates who think that BRT is a better solution for a specific application due to to the conditions of the territory. That’s the sort of argument which is made by transit opponents, who simply want to spend as little money as possible on transit.

And besides. The “typical ” cost doesn’t matter, at least not to transit professionals. (They do matter if your goal is to convince uninformed voters or politicians; but you’re posting in the wrong blog for that). Transit system development is a significant enough investment that every project requires due diligence (i.e. research and planning) to determine what is the most effective solution for that particular system, route, or network. Just because a particular technology works well in Brazil, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be the best solution for Boston. Or vice versa.

The primary cost advantage with BRT is “mostly-exclusive” BRT is possible–if the line has to cross a river, busses can enter mixed traffic and use the existing road infrastructure for a short bit, whereas trains cannot. The reason the Crenshaw line in LA could have reached Wilshire if BRT, but only goes as far as Exposition now that they’ve done LRT, is that north of Exposition the BRT would run in mixed traffic, whereas rail would have required a subway.

But outside that–exclusive-lane, surface LRT isn’t 3x the cost of BRT, especially when you have to buy land.

The problem here is two fold. The southern projects already exist. More so, 1/3 of all office space in metro Denver is on the corridor from I225 to e/c470 along I25. This plan already is arguably already out of whack in terms of meeting actual transportation needs. Of course some of that depends on the author’s question about where and whom should transit serve.

People are not stupid. No region or area would or should accept BRT as a compromise for fear of being stuck with it, even after good economic times return, as they will have to compete with other “new” areas wanting to be part of the system versus spending money to upgrade what the system already has.”

–Dan

So is driving a Ford instead of a BMW. The problem with rail is it is vastly more expensive. For example, the typical LRT project costs 3 times to build as BRT w/ a dedicated lane (so not even cheap BRT) and yet only yields 20% more trips.

The claims of lesser ride quality is a lie. That depends on how the agency configures the cars and buses; it is not about the mode itself. When I ride the bus, I only have to deal with the person sitting next to me; seat width. The pitch is still enough to sit comfortably and work on my latop. On the train, that isn’t the case. Not only is the width too small when someone sits next to me, but if someone else that’s 5’10″-6’0″ like me sits across from me (the seats face each other), not only will their knee rub against the inside of my knee (there is overlap) but it makes it difficult for me to work on my laptop and nearly impossible for both of us too. Trains aren’t magic.

While construction inflammation and the recession have been problems, they’re not the root causes. The first overarching problem is the project was too large. We’ve seen this time after time, year after year, decade after decade –> large projects can not be accurately planned and quickly turn out to have massive problems that delay their completion and vastly increase their costs. This isn’t unique to transit, we’ve seen it with the Big Dig and countless other large projects.

Construction cost inflation and recession are piss pour excuses by RTD and the public shouldn’t give the a free pass for them. Not because they happened; RTD doesn’t have control over that. Nevertheless, they used the CPI instead of projected Colorado Construction Cost Index increases in their projections. Using the latter would’ve narrowed that gap. And keep in mind their $4.7 billion had a 20% contingency in it PLUS the public said up to $7.2 billion was ok (so another 40% contingency!).

The recession is even less of an excuse. In projecting sales tax revenue increases, RTD didn’t even include one recession over the period of time the bonds were to be paid off. This despite historically there being one or two per decade. And the cherry on top of that inexcusable stinker was their cherry picking of sales tax revenues. They didn’t use future projections for sales tax revenue increases. Instead what they did was cherry pick the best possible sales tax revenue in the metro’s history and claim that would happen going forward. They picked a period when not only did metro Denver experience large population growth but it experienced huge household income growth (remember, historically the West was as poor as the deep south).

There are things that went wrong with this plan that RTD coudn’t control. We shouldn’t fault them for those. But overall, the project was too large and RTD’s planning too puerile to be able to survive anything going wrong.