{"id":30164,"date":"2015-02-11T05:00:14","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T10:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30164"},"modified":"2015-02-10T22:02:18","modified_gmt":"2015-02-11T03:02:18","slug":"light-rail-cool-but-ultra-expensive-buses-cheap-and-flexible-but-lack-glamour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/02\/11\/light-rail-cool-but-ultra-expensive-buses-cheap-and-flexible-but-lack-glamour\/","title":{"rendered":"Light rail – cool but ultra-expensive. Buses – cheap and flexible but lack glamour"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Mother Jones<\/em>, Kevin Drum<\/a> looks at the image problem of buses compared to the seemingly irresistable pull of light rail (at least to municipal politicians looking to overspend and under-deliver):<\/p>\n

Josh Barro<\/a> thinks our cities are building too much light rail. It’s expensive, often slow, and offers virtually no advantage over simply opening up a bus line. The problem, according to a 2009 report from the Federal Transit Administration, is that “Bus-based public transit in the United States suffers from an image problem.” But what if transit agencies tackled that image problem head on?<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

So perhaps we need a two-pronged marketing campaign if we want to attract more suburbanites onto buses. They need to be convinced that new bus lines are both bourgeois1<\/sup> and<\/em> safe. I might add that although Barro doesn’t highlight this particular feature, the Orange Line mentioned in the report also has “high frequencies.” That’s a key feature too, and it costs money. But it still costs less to run a high-frequency bus than an above-ground light rail system.<\/p>\n

Maybe we need more celebrities to ride the bus. I’ll bet if George Clooney took the bus to work, it would suddenly become a lot more popular. You’d probably need to increase service to accommodate all the paparazzi, but surely that’s a small price to pay?<\/p>\n

1<\/sup>I confess to some curiosity here. Did focus group participants really<\/em> refer to the Orange Line as a “bourgeois bus”? That seems a bit unlikely to me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum looks at the image problem of buses compared to the seemingly irresistable pull of light rail (at least to municipal politicians looking to overspend and under-deliver): Josh Barro thinks our cities are building too much light rail. It’s expensive, often slow, and offers virtually no advantage over simply opening up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,84,237,13],"tags":[711,1002,527],"class_list":["post-30164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-government","category-railways","category-usa","tag-infrastructure","tag-lightrail","tag-publictransit"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Qw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30164"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30165,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30164\/revisions\/30165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}