Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
While I agree that BRT isn't a large scale option, money spent on simple bus lanes could probably get us a lot farther than the same money spent on LRT and streetcars. I'm a proponent of urban rail, but at this point we have some catching up to do to actually get to that point imo.
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It might be difficult politically but at this point it makes sense to try to build an automated rapid transit system, and an automated bus system running in dedicated lanes is possible. In a few years a fully-automated bus system running in mixed traffic will be possible. Given the speed of bureaucracy, this means that any major transit improvement in Halifax is going to happen well into the era of self-driving vehicles.
The advantage of trains on dedicated tracks will decline somewhat because that will not be the only kind of transit system that can be automated. It will also be more viable to have smaller transit vehicles because there won't be the fixed overhead of one human driver per vehicle.
Battery-powered buses already exist too, and aside from the more abstract environmental benefits they produce less noise and no emissions.
So maybe buses will actually be a good choice. But they need to be modern rather, and they will need to be separated from other traffic or they won't make much difference.
The city needs to sort out ride sharing too. As far as I can tell it's conspicuously absent from the document but it is a huge improvement over the antiquated taxi system in cities that allow companies like Uber and Lyft to operate.