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Originally Posted by llamaorama
The usefulness of a bus route is crippled when they have to drive in the same traffic congestion as cars. BRT requires widening streets or reducing car lanes and often both, which in the downtown area is difficult to do in both an engineering and a political sense. The places where transit needs to go in central Austin don't have existing corridors where you can have room for seperate right of way at grade.
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The busiest remaining bus corridor in Calgary has no separation for buses though; it's just a 4 lane mixed-traffic road that goes into downtown with one lane reversed during peak hours. The BRT routes on it are just glorified express buses that only get a queue jump at certain intersections and signalling priority. Here's a section of that corridor about 1 mile north of downtown:
But it's still capable of carrying more than 30K riders per day with peaks of 80-90 (many of them articulated) buses per hour.
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The purpose of LRT in Austin is to create a high-speed central spine. The rest of the network proposed will be BRT or enhanced local bus service on major streets to feed into it.
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If we look at Calgary again, the LRT lines were developed based on a express bus service central spine. Calgary Transit released an article in 2006 that discussed some of the lessons learned. Two of them relate to the benefits of having a solid bus routes, corridors and ridership to build upon for LRT. The early lines also cheapened on things as much as possible in order to increase its reach; a lesson forgotten recently where the proposed Green Line has exploded in cost by $3-$4B with disastrous consequences.
https://www.calgarytransit.com/sites...rb_revised.pdf
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Capital Metro still runs a local bus system based on a 1990s paradigm when the city was small and downtown was tiny and the purpose of transit was just to give poor people and students a basic means of getting around only.
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But its operating budget is pretty big:
By comparison (and even ignoring the exchange rate), Calgary isn't much bigger ($428M, with 48% fare recovery) despite 5X the total ridership (and more than 2X the bus ridership). How does Capital Metro (and other Texas transit agencies) spend so much for so little to show for it?
