If the costs and benefits of bus rapid transit (BRT) and light rail transit (LRT) are compared, a national libertarian think tank would favor the former over the latter. That’s the conclusion of a study by the Cato Institute reached last month.
Here are a couple of the important findings from the paper: “A rapid bus system can offer more frequent service at faster average speeds and fewer transfers between transit vehicles, all at a lower cost than rail”, “Rapid bus systems are scalable, with low incremental costs, as downtown employment centers grow from 40,000 to 500,000 jobs. In contrast, rail systems
require huge expenditures to start up and expand”, and “While a four-line light-rail system can bring only about 36,000 people per hour into a downtown area, the rapid bus system described in this paper can bring as many as 140,000 people per hour into downtown.”
This is mentioned due to the fact that the County and the Port Authority are bullish on a BRT system for Oakland-Downtown and, at this stage of the game, the bullishness is based on a calculation of the startup of BRT to LRT (the current Mayor noted “We’ve talked about how to connect Oakland and Downtown for the 25 years I’ve been in politics and government. It’s always been too expensive…Now there is a proposal at 10 percent of the cost”) and the experience of Cleveland with its HealthLine BRT.
Interestingly, the Cato report shows that as a percentage of metro area employment, Pittsburgh and Cleveland have about the same share of job concentrated in their central business district (8.4% and 8.9%, respectively, with 92k in Pittsburgh and 85k in Cleveland). However, transit’s share of jobs in the CBD of those two cities was double in Pittsburgh than in Cleveland (32.1% to 15.1%).
