Over to you Mr. Cow – A View From a Canadian Transit Expert

Haveacow is a Canadian public transit specialist and what he says deserves to be listened to. As he is active in the transit profession in Canada, he would like to keep his real name out of the media.

The following is his reply to a post about BRT and contains so much importantAi?? information that it deserves a post of its own!

The following diagram may help explain the capacity issue comparing bus and LRT.

Guided Bus-ways have a big issue, capacity. The reason you have a guided bus-way is that, surface vehicles like buses can sway side to side quite a bit on a roadway. One of the reasons most Bus-way lanes are a minimum of 4 metres wide is to allow for that side to side sway that occurs naturally at higher speeds when we drive. Guided Bus-ways are fixed to their ai???Trackai??? or Concrete Guideway or fixed using a laser/optical system that electronically locks them into a right of way so no side to side sway occurs at all. Optical systems also have an additional issue in that they are highly weather dependent and are very costly to service. The advantage for the guided bus-ways is that, your right of way can be considerably less wide much like a rail line right of way. Unless you design a complex concrete guideway bypass at Bus-way stations or an electronic one using optical guided equipment, the buses are forever trapped behind the buses in front of them. This severely limits system capacity.

The real problem common with BRT is the operating cost of carrying the large amount of passengers, only using buses, once the passenger levels become very high. That level is different for every city and is dependent on the exact nature and characteristics of the right of way. The picture Zwei used of the Brisbane Busway is another common occurrence on successful Bus-ways, bus back ups at choke points or stations. The company MMM Consulting (nee McCormik Rankin Consulting) was the main designer and developer of both Ottawaai??i??s Transit-way System and its child, the Brisbane Bus-way Network, the subject of the articleai??i??s main picture.

The main differences between the two are the fact that Ottawaai??i??s Transit-way System was designed and mostly built in the 70ai???s, 80ai???s and 90ai???s whereas, Brisbaneai??i??s was designed and built in the 90ai???s, 00ai???s and 10ai???s. The other major difference is that unlike Ottawa, Brisbane was able to build a fully segregated right of way through its downtown which comprised below grade tunnels and above grade viaducts and a physically segregated surface route. Ottawa has painted bus lanes on a couplet of downtown one-way streets with signal modification which allow Transit-way (east-west traffic) almost the legal limit of signal priority over the north-south traffic at intersections. The difference between the two, using roughly the same number of vehicles about 185-200 buses/hour/direction at peak the Ottawa Transit-way can move 10500 people/hour/ direction and Brisbane about 14,000p/h/d.

Both however, have the same issue, massive back ups of buses primarily at downtown or major bus-way stations because the size and handling capacity of the actual stations has been grossly under built. The issue is that, to handle these kind of crowds and move them with 12 and 18 metre single articulated buses (23 metre long, double articulated and 30 metre long triple articulated buses are not street legal in Canada or Australia and even in the USA for that matter) you must construct monster sized, at the least full metro sized or larger bus station platforms that are or exceed 150 metres in length. The stations also have to be 4 lanes wide, 4 metres per lane, not including station platform width. Most downtown businesses would not want to be located near one of these stations for obvious reasons. One of Brisbaneai??i??s bus-way stations was enlarged to this standard, the bus back up picture Zwei used for this article is the que of buses entering that station.

The other main issue is the operational cost of having to use that many bus drivers and buses. Buses in general have far too little capacity for these high traffic BRT operations. In China and Latin America drivers cost much less as a proportion of the total operating cost of each bus 50-60% in Latin America and 30-45% in China. In the northern 2/3 North America, Western and Central Europe, Australia/New Zealand, Japan Taiwan, basically most of the so called developed world, the cost of the bus driver is 70-80% of the total cost of operating the bus. Using 185-200 buses/hour/direction to move people becomes a great financial drain on the operating bus system as a whole and makes it almost impossible to get extra buses to other non bus-way routes that need them. In Ottawa, several suburban routes that have needed many more buses to handle their high passenger levels canai??i??t get them and havenai??i??t been able to for more than a decade because so many buses are tied up on the Transit way, either on it or at the stations during peak hours. There are barely enough extra buses left to handle individual bus breakdowns let alone provide extra service on other routes. Buying more buses was not an answer because Ottawaai??i??s bus fleet was already near 1100 vehicles this is a pretty big fleet for a city and area of at most, 1.2 million people. This would put the operational budget into a serious deficit. We already had the most expensive per taxpayer transit portion on our tax bills of all Ontario municipalities it really does not need to go higher. The bus options had run out of time. Ottawaai??i??s answer was LRT. Brisbane continues to maintain their heavily used portions of busways. Ottawa is building more Transit ways but in suburban areas with much lighter passenger traffic levels.

The Transit-way was designed to be converted to rail however, the cost to convert the first part would be an eye popping $2.1 Billion. The reason was no one ever figured how much extra work there would be like, having to build parallel temporary bus rights of way so that, all those buses didnai??i??t totally clog city streets during conversion of the Transit-way to rail and the fact that, they waited till much the original Transit-way infrastructure was in desperate need of replacement due to age. Some Transitway right of way also was only temporary and not rail friendly. These temporary rights of way lasted for over 30 years and now have to be either totally rebuilt and or abandoned at high cost. The kicker about the high operational cost of servicing bus-ways at high passenger demands was that, even with Ottawa being forced to build a 2.5 km tunnel, with 3 very large underground stations at a cost of $715 Million under downtown for the LRT line (surface operation would have simply exchanged heavy surface bus traffic and passenger crowds for heavy surface LRV traffic and passenger crowds) operationally, Ottawa was going to save a minimum of $60 million a year, switching to LRT technology.

The take away from this is that, building ai???Real BRTai??? can be a very good way of building up ridership and up to a certain point, a less costly way, compared to a lot of rail systems, to move people in a North American low density environment. The problem now even in Canada is that, politicians are building express bus systems like B Lines, Bramptonai??i??s Zum (pronounced zoom) and many comparable systems in the US and calling it BRT, which it really is not. Those politicians love doing it because this false BRT is much cheaper to build and operate than real BRT and they still get a ribbon cutting ceremony. The problem is that, the amount you spend with these systems generally is comparable to the systems effectiveness in moving passengers. VIVA, (York Region Transit) for example, started with the faux BRT or what I like to call ai???BRT Liteai??? but, had definite designs and plans to build physically separate BRT rights of way that can be converted to a high capacity LRT system in the future and has carried through on it. York Region just didnai??i??t have the passenger count to build LRT at the beginning. But they have designed in the ability to easily convert the BRT system to LRT technology when needed. Brampton (which is part of Peel Region) just to the west of York Region has no definite plan or design to convert its Zum system to a real BRT standard now or in the future. However, the Zum System has built up Bramptonai??i??s transit ridership. I am not saying that, these ai???BRT Liteai??? systems arenai??i??t useful but they are not real BRT and should be labeled as that because they can confuse people into not building anything in places that need improved transit but canai??i??t afford to build or operate LRT and or support LRT with enough passengers. As a planner it is quite common to hear comments like this at public meetings,ai??? I saw BRT in Brampton and it gets stuck in regular traffic all the time. BRT sucks!ai??? Then you have to explain what real BRT is and is not, by then most people fall asleep or stop listening.

Then you get into a half technical half ethical problem with BRT and or any other transit operating technology for that matter. How do you study the differences between operating technology so that you are being fair as well as being accurate in the final choice of technology? The best recent example of what not to do is right here locally in Vancouver, South of the Fraser River, to be exact.

Trying to convince people in Surrey that, their LRT plan is useful, TransLink used a SkyTrain option as well as a surface BRT option to compare to LRT capability, pointing out the superiority of LRT in this case. The SkyTrain option had many problems cost and general usefulness being the main ones. The BRT example they used is actually an LRT line using buses operating on a layout and design which is not even close to what a real BRT line in a on-street environment would or should be using. Its not even close to the best Canadian practices, let alone best practices used in the rest of the world, with BRT systems in a on-street environment. Did the staff doing this know enough to do this purposely or were they ignorant of the differences of what good BRT design is or is not. Their example of LRT also displays a either a serious lack of knowledge about best surface LRT operating practices in the US and Canada. More importantly it shows to me, how committed or in this case not committed, TransLink staff really are to studying LRT technology at all. In fact, I donai??i??t blame the people who supported SkyTrain technology for this area, like Daryl from SkyTrain for Surrey, he had a point, on the surface this study definitely made it look like that to me that the SkyTrain Light Metro was the superior technology choice. The difference as a professional is that, I know the real differences in all the technologies that were studied. I also have no belief that, I am the be all and end all of studying these things in the world and would also ask for much help in studying these technology choices from other friends and companies I am familiar with, whom are experts at it. To me a whole new study should be done using the actual best practices for all technologies not just the preferred LRT technology, you should seriously question major aspects and assumptions that were made in this particular TransLink study.

Leave A Comment