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Math fail. Those are busy stations, with about 120,000/day getting on and off. If one person gets off at Embarcadero and another gets on, two people passed through the station. Only one was carried at a time.
Reading comprehension fail.
Even more interesting is the “peak of the peak” – numbers obtained from internal modeling, showing riders traveling to the most congested stops in the San Francisco Financial District.
“Those peak hour trains are the most crowded,” Bolcik said. “We still have capacity, but we are running the maximum number of trains and cars at those times.”
Quote:
Constraint is the stations. System is running at basically capacity.
From your previous link 'more cars and a better train control system get them a 43% increase in capacity.' The constraint isn't the system design - it's the ability to make investments in it.
It's ridership volumes aren't high for light rail system in general; just American ones. Any cost advantage of larger trains would more obvious for a more used system
Off-peak you could run 5 buses per hour and that would cost a lot less than four trains. You'd have to cut the train frequency to once every 30 minutes (or less) to be cost effective versus the bus. Of course, with wait times that long that might mean one train per hour to make sense. Even in Portland, Pintland time only gets you so far.
Your math is not adding up, Portland has no problem running trains at every 15 minutes even on off peak hours and still having plenty of riders. For a true BRT system to keep up with that would require more than 5 buses per hour.
I get it, you like buses more than trains, but your math isn't adding up. Also, at peak times, you would have to add up to 15 more buses per line just to keep up with 4 trains. During peak times, it would cost twice as much to operate BRT than it does light rail at its current pace per line.
Take the blue line, during peak morning hours between 6-9am it runs 8 trains an hour, and non peak hours between 9am-4pm it runs 4 trains per hour. The evening peak hours between 4-6p it runs 8 trains an hour. And then for the evening off peak hours it runs 4 trains per hour.
Now for BRT to keep up with LRT during peak hours, it would have to offer the same capacity numbers. During peak hours, BRT would have to run 35 buses to provide the numbers LRT does along the blue line that does it with 8 trains. That would be 25,700 people moved during the two peak hour periods, leaving 39,500 to be moved during off peak hours, if we go by just the average with the line running from 4am-1am would be moving 2,500 per hour for off peak hours. Obviously this is just an average per hour rather than what really happen, I doubt 2,500 people are riding the Blue Line at 4am. But to move that amount of people, BRT would still need to run 20 buses per hour to match what the Blue Line does per off peak hour.
That would mean operating costs would be higher for BRT during peak and off peak hours to provide the same service the Blue Line currently provides. That is why LRT makes sense for Portland. I completely agree with you that most cities cannot match the performance level of Portland and BRT would make more sense to start out with, but also keep in mind BRT has a ridership ceiling compared to operating costs that cannot match LRT.
Oh I am not saying the stigma doesn't exist in places like that as well, though for those that you know in San Francisco and Toronto that won't use the bus but will use rail, there are people that are more than happy to use the bus. All one has to do is look at the bus ridership numbers in those cities. I know here in Portland we have a large percentage of people who willingly ride the bus rather than use their car to commute downtown.
Ridership level by itself isn't an indicator of happiness. There are millions of people who work at
at McDonalds, Walmart and other low pay service jobs, as well as students who have to get to school and can't yet
afford a car. People who are making 8 or 9 dollars an hour can barely afford to pay their rent let alone the expense o buying and owning a car. But they still have to get to work everyday and that's the primary demographic buses are meant to serve. It doesn't mean they like taking the bus. They don't have much choice. It's often the only affordable means of transportation they have for
the most part. In contrast 80% of MAX light rail passengers are choice riders according to Trimet.
Even more interesting is the “peak of the peak” – numbers obtained from internal modeling, showing riders traveling to the most congested stops in the San Francisco Financial District.
“Those peak hour trains are the most crowded,” Bolcik said. “We still have capacity, but we are running the maximum number of trains and cars at those times.”
From your previous link 'more cars and a better train control system get them a 43% increase in capacity.' The constraint isn't the system design - it's the ability to make investments in it.
Yes. Unfortunately capacity does you no real good when you can't get the trains to leave the station which means you can't make your theoretical headways. Constraint is the station capacity. Better signalling and more standees won't help you there. BART isn't dumb. They're not proposing double-sided entry just because it costs a lot of money.
A SkyTrain segment that can be expected to feature a headway of 75 seconds (the theoretical maximum possible headway) with exclusive use of 5-car variant ART 300 trains (i.e. the segment between Columbia and Waterfront Stations) has a massive theoretical carrying capacity of 44,800 people per hour per direction (pphpd) with a 925 passenger carrying capacity of each train [61] at a 6 passengers/m2 crush-load density.
Once you're running five car trains, you're past BRT capacity. And a bus every 75 seconds is liable to be unreliable. A five car SkyTrain is more like a subway system than typical light rail though.
I think that's the point though. That LRT is versatile. It can run in the street, it can handle grade crossings, but it can also do pretty much whatever heavy rail can do . . . and when LRT is driverless as in Vancouver the operating costs become competitive with BRT.
Ridership level by itself isn't an indicator of happiness. There are millions of people who work at
at McDonalds, Walmart and other low pay service jobs, as well as students who have to get to school and can't yet
afford a car. People who are making 8 or 9 dollars an hour can barely afford to pay their rent let alone the expense o buying and owning a car. But they still have to get to work everyday and that's the primary demographic buses are meant to serve. It doesn't mean they like taking the bus. They don't have much choice. It's often the only affordable means of transportation they have for
the most part. In contrast 80% of MAX light rail passengers are choice riders according to Trimet.
I don't follow you on this point, is this just a statement you are making or a comment on my post because I wasn't talking about happiness of a rider. Heck, I have never met a person that loves sitting in traffic either, and I am sure there are people that take the bus that aren't happy they have to.
The point I was making is that people who use transit in Portland do so willingly in many cases.
It's ridership volumes aren't high for light rail system in general; just American ones. Any cost advantage of larger trains would more obvious for a more used system
Yeah, higher volume than is demanded in America is really where LRT shows more of a clear advantage with reduced operating costs than BRT.
Going back to real world numbers for an apples to oranges comparison: Breaking down the economics of bus vs MAX - Portland Transport
Yellow line (least used) gets a subsidy of $1.32 a ride versus a frequent bus being $1.54. Assuming that the yellow line basically replaced a frequent bus, that gives you an idea of savings. 22 cents a ride.
Apples to apples, of course, would be what a bus and rail would cost on identical or as practical as possible to routes.
Yes. Unfortunately capacity does you no real good when you can't get the trains to leave the station which means you can't make your theoretical headways. Constraint is the station capacity. Better signalling and more standees won't help you there. BART isn't dumb. They're not proposing double-sided entry just because it costs a lot of money.
The stations aren't at capacity now. You might be approaching it at Embarcadero where you have a lot of peak hour alighting but then you also have a lot of peak hour boarding from ferry, Muni, and bus transfers but it's not the same problem at the other stations. It might become more of a problem if/when a 2nd transbay tube happens and there's an interchange station at Powell or Montgomery.
It's certainly not a systemwide problem for BART and it's a problem that BRT runs into at much lower passenger counts.
I don't follow you on this point, is this just a statement you are making or a comment on my post because I wasn't talking about happiness of a rider. Heck, I have never met a person that loves sitting in traffic either, and I am sure there are people that take the bus that aren't happy they have to.
The point I was making is that people who use transit in Portland do so willingly in many cases.
You said there was a correlation between high ridership level and rider happiness - "there are people that are
more than happy to use the bus. All one has to do is look at the bus ridership numbers in those cities."
But all that means is there are thousands of low wage service workers in the city who have to get to their jobs.
On $9 an hour wages they can't afford a car so they take the bus. And they don't live by a rail stop because
the housing located near rail stops tend to command higher rents. Of course they are willing to take
the bus but being willing to do something isn't the same as being happy to do it. I'm sure there are many
who are willing to work at Walmart because they have to make a living but that doesn't mean they are
happy to do it. I doubt any of them are.
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