Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote user="daveklepper"] One other factor not mentioned is operating cost.   Note the subsidy per passenger for both bus and light rail.   Operating costs are less for light rail because one operator handles more people.   Maintencance is less, including fixed plant maintenance, because light rail cars don't require new tires very often, nor oil changes, etc.  So it may be that over a very long period of time, the investment in light rail will have saved money.   This is possible if 22,000 or 25,000 use the particular line daily, and there are no tremendous unusual costs like tunnels or long bridges. By heavy rail, do people mean diesel commuter trains?  Or third-rail high-platform rapid transit?  The advantages are higher speed, and the dissadvantges are less convenient and fewer stations, basically. [/quote] DART's bus system serves hundreds of miles of routes compared to 93 miles for the light rail system. The bus system has 11,351 bus stops, 929 shelters, and 1,336 benches.  It has 14 bus transit centers/transfer centers/park&ride centers, and it operates 3 maintenance facilities.  The light rail system serves 61 stations and has 2 maintenance centers.   The FY14 subsidy for the bus is $5.10 per passenger vs. $4.11 per passenger for the light rail. This is not necessarily a good comparison, however, because the buses serve less dense population areas, in many instances, and frequently are run for political rather than economic reasons.   The key comparison, in my mind, would be the cost of running buses over the same routes as the light rail, which was done during the early stages of DART, before the coming of the light rail, but it would be impossible to make the comparison today. Clearly, the operator of a light rail train is more productive than the operator of a bus, but outside of rush hour, maybe he does not need to be, since the load factors during non-peak hours is not much greater than could be handled by the rapid bus transit vehicles in Austin.
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag