stldotage wrote:StlAlex wrote: ↑10:33 PM - 6 days ago
1) This is a flawed assumption considering we are talking about American BRT.
What assumption? I'm pointing to the facts of the project as proposed -- it is meant to match rail benefits with all of the amenities I listed. I asked you a direct question that you have not answered. What is missing from the Green Line BRT proposal other than rails and overhead wires? We haven't even seen station renderings (only concepts) because we're not at that phase yet...but from a conceptual standpoint, what is missing from the proposal versus in-street light rail?
There's currently no evidence that Indianapolis' $288 million worth of BRT has attracted any new riders
This could be 100 percent true or 100 percent false but, either way, I'm not certain Indianapolis's line is that comparable to St. Louis's. But that might be beside the point. Ultimately we lack the target/control groups here to definitively state that in your Indy example, light rail definitely would have attracted new riders and its BRT system failed to do so (because Indy didn't build rail).
No one is actively choosing to go car free and rely on the BRT the way they do for MetroLink here
If we had hard and fast numbers on this statement, your points would be more well-taken. And also the data would need to demonstrate that these people would NOT support a BRT with the same amenities as Metrolink.
Madison, WI is seeing a similar story with the $195M BRT just cannibalizing pre-existing bus ridership
Why is improving bus service automatically an act of cannibalism but diverting a humongous amount of transit funding to a less extensive rail project (which would of course also pull the majority of its riders from existing lines) not also cannibalistic? All transit investments, whether we like it or not, have a limited capture in a car-centric society, so you will never build a piece of transit infrastructure that is purely new riders, especially in a place that's not growing in population or jobs to begin with. Either we argue that transit investments/improvements are worthy for the benefit of existing riders (
and to attract new ones) or we accept that public transit, like public housing before it, is a bare-minimum means of last resort.
Here's a good question....if MetroLink magically became a BRT with 20 min per line frequencies, RR grade signal priority, and the same speed (even though that's obviously not possible as train acceleration is better than bus), do you think ridership would go down, up, or stay the same?
If Metrolink rails were removed tomorrow and replaced with the same Green Line bus fleet that was proposed for this current BRT (and, as you noted, kept to the same schedule), I do not see why ridership would drop in the slightest. Please explain why it would.
AGAIN, I've said multiple times that there were tons of improvements that could have been made to the alignment of the LRT.
You have said this -- but you also have championed the end product that resulted from the planning/design effort (the old Metrolink Green Line)
as a good idea and a better one than BRT. Considering the costs and the extreme unlikelihood that a low-ridership, expensive train serving fewer neighborhoods would ever have been built, you have therefore supported a worse transit outcome for a majority of riders (certainly on the North Side) for the benefit of a few South Siders (granted, a good portion, if not a majority, of the Green Line MetroLink's theoretical ridership would likely have come from the existing #11 Chippewa bus).
I think at this point we can just agree to disagree - and to remind you, I am an urban nerd like this rest of us here. I love trains (lol - funny sentence for an adult to type).
Nothing would make me happier than to have even
one of these added lines built from this 2005 study:
Metro2005.png
That said, we live in St. Louis City, not Sim City. It's 2026, not 1926. Respectfully, let's be at least somewhat realistic and push for a better Metro system with better service, frequency, and access for as many residents as we can.
1) We don't actually know what they're planning on building, the closest we have is a snapshot of Florrisant, if they choose that route. So an assumption that they will build a Gold standard BRT, which has only been done a couple times in the US, is a flawed assumption, especially for an administration that tried not-at-all to improve the LRT option.
2) I'm comparing Indianapolis because their system is listed as an example on the website and it is probably the single most comparable example we will find in technology and city size. They've also been highly celebrated as a success in more "cost efficient" transit.
We can use Cincinnati as a control. They spent ~$100 million on a 3.6 mile downtown streetcar that gets ~1 million yearly riders instead of BRT. Their bus ridership is 96.8% of their 2019 ridership in 2025. Indianapolis spent $288 million on ~24 miles of BRT and their bus ridership is 79% of their 2019 ridership. If the massive spending on BRT infrastructure was worth it, they wouldn't be trailing Cincinnati, a city that has no BRT lines with none planned as far as I'm aware.
What Cincinnati shows is that by simply increasing and expanding service (they introduced 24 hour bus lines and increased frequency system wide), you can generate tons of ridership growth without spends hundreds of millions on fancy infrastructure that doesn't actually have any meaningful impact.
3) We have the numbers. Places like Pheonix and Seattle saw large ridership increases after opening new LRT lines. People actively choosing public transit over cars. We also havr numbers from Indianapolis and Madison, where bus ridership dropped after "generational" investments opened.
4) Cannibalization matters because it's not worth it to spend hundreds of millions of dollars just to have a transit system just as depending on the ebbs and flows of transit demands and the people who are riding it because it's their only option. With buses, it especially matters because you can get most, if not all, of the benefits of BRT by just increasing bus frequency. A fully canibalized ridership means you don't have anyone leaving their car at home, choosing to park and ride, or anyone not otherwise reliant for financial reasons choosing to use the brand new transit. As far as I'm concerned, major investments in transit should be about attracting new riders, especially in a city like St. Louis, not about making those already using it happier. You don't spend hundreds of millions without the intention of having more riders than what you started with.
In my view, the continued austerity of transit in general is doubling down on the reality that transit in much of America is effectively a welfare program. The degradation of metros to light rail, then light rail to streetcar, and now BRT is all being done because we don't want to spend money on what is broadly seen as a welfare program.
5) Now we've revealed that you truly see LRT as equal to BRT, when it is not at all. MetroLink runs at a much higher capacity than a BRT equivalent. During rush times, and especially high demand events, you would need 2 or 3 buses to carry the same number of people as 1 train. Additionally, ingress and egress would be more difficult for those using wheel chairs or strollers, and take longer, as buses cannot get as close to the platform as consistently as a train can. Then, while small, there's the issue of acceleration, where the trains, which are propelled by more than 1 or 2 sets of wheels, can do it much faster than a bus, which adds up across a system-wide trip. These all appear as little nit picks, but they all add up. Do you have to worry about the bus not getting as close as you need to wheel yourself on? Can you be sure that you won't have to be crammed into a stranger? Is the ride itself going to be relatively smooth and predictable? In Indianapolis, it isn't uncommon for BRT buses to get stuck in rush hour traffic, post event traffic, or buses to just not show up because that scheduled bus was cut to keep hourly frequency on a different line (this wouldnt be as big of a Metro issue because Metro is better funded than IndyGo).
If MetroLink were originally built as BRT, its capacity would have eventually maxed out and it wouldn't have ever reached the ridership it saw in its hay day, or maybe even what we have today. A good example would be LA Metro's G Line, which peaked at 9.2 million riders in 2013 but was not able to get any higher and slowly degraded in large part due to it being over capacity and unable to fulfill the demand, which in turn made the experience miserable and uncomfortable. MetroLink peaked at 20.2 million in 2008, a peak simply impossible for an American BRT to ever reach without degrading system-wide service. Should also be noted that the G Line directly feeds the B Line, a full fledged metro line, so a lot of that ridership was just trying to.....get on the train.
This doesn't all necessarily apply to the N-S route, but it does demonstrate that BRT is not equal to LRT, even if you really wanna pretend that it is.
6) I believe a shorter, more expensive, better/more effective alignment of LRT would be better than a longer, cheaper BRT, that will effectively be a merger of bus lines that already exist. To get the benefit of BRT, just merge the #11 and #4 into a 15-min frequency line without spending hundreds of millions of dollars. And you could maybe start getting closer to the 11 miles with LRT if you committed to securing more funding sources, like a sales tax district or property tax hike. Much of the extra north side alignment would just be turning the #4 into the "Green Line", which I do not see as a very meaningful or good faith improvement. No one is buying a home in North City because they can take the bus downtown, just isn't a real thing even if I wish it was.
7) A better Metro system would be doing what Cincinnati did and increase bus frequency, not waste hundreds of millions of dollars on a branded bus, OR do what Pheonix and Seattle are doing and build actual transit improvements that draw people out of their cars.
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