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The city would be so much more pleasant to be in without the noise, pollution, dangers and
stress of bumper to bumper car congestion. And no longer such an eyesore.
Wouldn't induced demand still apply here? If the roads become less congested, won't that encourage those who haven't switched to transit to drive more?
Only if all else is equal. People switching to transit doesn't necessarily make the streets less congested, but it increases total capacity--that crowded street filled with cars plus a bus holds almost twice as many commuters as just the street crowded with cars, and multiple buses or more high-capacity transit increases the capacity even more. Reducing street congestion can only be achieved by other means that limit the area's utility to cars--road diets, market-based parking prices, or increased mixed-use and higher residential densities. But the main driver that moves people to other transit modes is crowded streets.
"Congestion" itself isn't a bad thing, unless your highest priority is for automobiles to travel as fast as possible at all times. Detroit has plenty of wonderfully uncongested streets, for example, but nobody recommends destroying their economic infrastructure and depopulating their city to achieve LOS A (except maybe Joel Kotkin.)
If the circuituity of the bus routes is high enough, the buses can result in more congestion, not less. Plus buses act basically like chloresterol in the road system.
In that case, the response is "don't do that." If you have to run so many buses that they block traffic, your city probably needs fixed-rail transit to move the higher capacities, or distribute bus routes on more streets to provide better coverage.
I agree with wburg that congestion isn't a problem. It can be a symptom of a problem, if the problem is something in the roadway design which causes a bottleneck.
But, otherwise, congestion is how we "price" roadway use when there is no use fee. In the absence of prices to gauge the value of various options, we use the difficulty and travel time to gauge the value of one route or departure time against others.
If, however, a government wants to reduce congestion, the most effective solution is demand pricing, wherein tolls are based upon use rates for a roadway or area.
In that case, the response is "don't do that." If you have to run so many buses that they block traffic, your city probably needs fixed-rail transit to move the higher capacities, or distribute bus routes on more streets to provide better coverage.
Most buses here only have 0-5 passengers on them, so it's not really that there's any capacity issues beyond too little to justify their existence. It's more that buses stop in the middle of the street blocking the traffic lanes than that there's a lot of them.
Rail service can be an economical way to serve riders. The Rail Runner in NM cost only $4 million per mile and attracts 4500 riders daily. Probably the equivalent during rush hour of an additional lane of expressway. Often the cost of building new lanes becomes astronomical with more right of way and reconfiguring existing interchanges required.
It's actually $843 million for the Road Runner project, including the planning, purchase of the ROW, construction, and financing. The other problem is no one really knows who is going to pay for it as the federal subsidy dollars are drying up. Probably a local sales tax, but that remains to be seen. It costs ~$24 million per year to operate in addition to the capital costs with only about $3 million or 12.5% being paid by the users.
In comparison, a highway lane costs about $10-20k a year to maintain and a larger chunk is paid for by user fees (gas taxes). So figure 200 highway lane miles costs only about 1/6th of what it costs to operate the train. A highway lane in each direction would also have much greater capacity. 4,500 boardings is only an extra 1,500 cars on the road per day for commute use. (4,500/2 = 2250, since commuters use it round-trip; 2250/1.5, since the average car has 1.5 occupants).
So the question is really who is going to pay for it? It costs 6x as much as a highway lane that would accomidate much more people. It's not like fares can realistically be raised to cover any of the extra costs since most people prefer to drive since it's more effective. That leaves the tax payer. If the tax payer is fine paying for something very few people have any interest in, go for it. A long-term funding source should have been planned before the project was built, but government is generally shortsighted and assumes people are dumb and don't realize that the $800 million spent is a sunk cost that doesn't justify continuing the subsidy. Portland is running into the same problem with its "economical" rail transit too. No long-term funding was put in place, it requires huge subsidizes to operate. They've had to cut back service and are most likely going to be cutting their support of the streetcar entirely.
That isn't to say rail can't be economical, but you need a lot more users than 4,500 weekday boardings on a ~100 mile system. BART does fairly well. It covers about 5x as much of the operating costs, but then it has more like 375,000 weekday boardings on roughly the same system mileage. You really need that massive economy of scale for rail to make sense.
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