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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

In almost all cases you don't have enough passanges to fill a large bus though. And in most of the cases where you do you should be paying 3 drivers to get three buses because that increased service is highly valued by riders. Long before you reach the end of that a grade separeted metro that can go faster that a bus or tram should be built thus getting mose people off the but. Only a few places in the world are left after the above where you need more than a bus can do at grade level (which implies a lot of short trips), but if you are in one I'll grant a tram is needed.

the 'rail factor' is claimed often - but I've never seen it put to a fair test. When you give the train better service of course people choose to use it.

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Yeah, you need a pretty high population density before you get to the point where rail makes sense. That said, having rail connecting major metros does make sense generally, especially with how often people travel.

In the UK, I had to take a train from Preston England to London (2004ish). It was absolutely packed. A good reason for that is the ticket price was about 60 gbp and the trip took 3 hours (IIRC).

That's where I think the US should both invest and subsidize. There's a lot of air travel that could be replaced with rail travel if the US rail wasn't so terribly ran. It usually costs more than an airline ticket (which is crazy) and often takes a lot longer due to delays waiting on commercial trains. A lot of that can be fixed by regulating commercial rail shipping (for example, limiting train length). But also building new dedicated highspeed lines between major metros. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to make a trip from Seattle to Florida in under 48h by rail and for less than $500.

A train should be cheaper and faster than a car. It should be cheaper than a plane.

Long distance rail doesn't make sense without local transport. If I have to rent a car when I get there I can justify a much longer drive - and because cars are door to door the drive isn't that much longer. Flying goes far enough that driving doesn't make sense.

i use amtrak once in a while, but I hate driving and still can only justify it because my body can't sit in a car that long without pain

There are absolutely zillions of cities in the world where buses aren’t enough on trunk lines but rapid transit metro would be ridiculous overkill, mostly in the 100k to 500k population segment. And in bigger cities with metros there are many routes where a metro expansion doesn’t make sense but buses aren’t enough.

I mean, this isn’t some theoretical question where the jury is still out there, there are countless examples. Cities everywhere don’t build LRT just for fun and because they have too much money! If there aren’t enough people for LRT that just means the town isn’t big enough, which is fair, or there are too few transit users due to car culture or whatever (eg. the US, which is an outlier).

The rail factor is not a hypothesis, the entire point is that it’s a discovered effect. If you haven’t seen it put to test, you simply haven’t been looking.

As one datapoint, I can simply point to the city where I live [1]: the LRT system that opened in 2021 has become exceedingly popular and effortlessly lifted transit use from the covid slump, with total passenger numbers now much higher than in 2019 and quite a bit higher than the rather conservative projections made when the system was being planned. Headways have already been shortened from 7.5 to 6 minutes to respond to peak hour demand, and extension modules have been ordered to lengthen a part of the fleet of 37m vehicles to 47m, adding 30% to the 260-passenger capacity.

On the other hand, another Finnish city of roughly the same size has been equivocating between LRT and BRT for years and years. Countless reviews have made it clear that essentially the only thing that BRT has going for it is lower up-front investment. It has also become quite clear that the only reason BRT keeps being discussed is that it’s used merely as a political tool to induce analysis paralysis, to delay and hinder any significant transit improvement by those against anything except antiquated car-centric urban design.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampere_light_rail

> Countless reviews have made it clear that essentially the only thing that BRT has going for it is lower up-front investment.

Plus maybe another legitimiate niche in developing countries where drivers' salaries are cheaper relative to capital investments cost.

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