When you’re a third-world city, you shouldn’t have “that kind of future thinking.” You should forget innovating and instead think hard on which first-world transit success you want to emulate. For Indy to do otherwise is like for a middle school student to try to prove open research-level conjectures in math.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/02/3d-express-coach-pictures_n_667452.html?ref=fb&src=sp

Not really necessarily a car-straddling bus, but that kind of future thinking about how to use our existing infrastructure in better, greener, more accessible way.

It could be sales taxes, property taxes, payroll taxes, parking charges, whatever. Just find the money.

Try not to rely on state or federal subsidies. For one thing, they require a minimum ridership threshold. Second, state and federal subsidies are not free money. They are very competitive, and the agency loses a significant percentage of the money to administration and compliance.

A mediocre system is going to cost more, but paradoxically, it’s going to cost less at the same time. Expanding a system will mean paying more in operating costs, yet an expanded system means it becomes more attractive to riders. More riders means the relative cost of carrying the passengers comes down as well.

Once you have the service, it is also key to get people to ride the system.

I think Cleveland’s new HealthLine BRT has been a success and think that most who ride it frequently would agree. It is not as much faster than the old 6 as it what supposed to be, but it is faster, and it is infinitely more pleasant. Service is frequent, and there is never a time when it is not running.

The HealthLine’s advantage over Red Line rail service, which has the same eastern endpoint, is its excellent access to everything along Euclid Ave., a street of many destinations. On the other hand, the Red Line is much faster if you are traveling to the middle of downtown or to the west side.

I lived in Chicago for many years and dreaded my morning commute on the 151 Sheridan bus. Getting on the bus was a challenge and trying to get off before the end of the line was often a humiliating and frustrating experience. For some reason, the same crowded conditions on the L were not as unpleasant. I think the smoothness of the ride helped.

As for Indy, I just don’t know where it should even begin. Such a wonderful and surprising city, but its minimal public transit system is a glaring flaw.

2) In most cases, increasing ridership only results in increasing the gap. Getting to mediocre as described by Mr. Wad #1 is going to be very difficult for most systems.

One would hope that BRT could be a gap closer by achieving more fares per driver hour. Labor costs appear to be the larges transit cost by far.

Now, it’s true that railstitution of bus traffic can lead to increased ridership. Some of the regional rail lines Germany has reopened recently get three times the traffic of the buses they replaced. Even small cities can have successful rail spines, when government regulations don’t make regional rail prohibitively expensive. However, for many lines, buses would be a better solution than rail, as long as the city treated them like transportation rather than like charity.

There is evidence that light rail can positively attract development; there is nothing to suggest that it will attract development.

I offer the example of the Los Angeles Blue Line. Shameless plug time: On MetroRider, I wrote about what effect the Blue Line has had after it celebrated its 20th year of operations last week.

http://metroriderla.com/2010/07/15/blue-line-20-year-progress-report/

As transportation, the Blue Line is a blockbuster success. It may still be the busiest stand-alone light rail line in the U.S. It went from 19,000 rides in 1990 to ridership that fluctuates from 70,000 to 80,000 today.

The ridership quadrupled, but the Blue Line has done very little for community development. The development it has attracted is concentrated in downtown Los Angeles and downtown Long Beach.

The transformation of downtown L.A. happened because of the real estate bubble, not for the Blue Line that had been running for a decade and a half. The transformation of downtown Long Beach was set in motion by the Blue Line, yet today that development has shriveled to a small sliver.

The rest of the Blue Line runs through L.A.’s industrial slums and ghettos. Today, with 20 years of light rail, South L.A., Compton and north Long Beach continue to remain slums and ghettos.

Is this uniquely an L.A. problem? Probably not. The same problem exists in Chicago’s South Side, inner St. Louis and East St. Louis, Oakland and Richmond BART stations, Miami, Newark, Camden, Trenton and the Bronx and Queens.

The presence of rail lines didn’t stop community investment from avoiding black neighborhoods. This has been the pattern nationwide.

Also, for the areas that have attracted development, remember that Portland is the only U.S. city where the transit agency sees any sort of upside from the development transactions. In most other cities, the transit agency sees little to no monetary benefit from the development value it created; those go to other governmental agencies.

More importantly, what effects have transit-oriented developments had on rail ridership? The Blue Line in L.A. has been a ridership success in spite of no development; the newer Gold Line between L.A. and Pasadena has an incredible gravitational pull for development yet it has been a ridership failure. (The extension to poor Boyle Heights and East L.A. seems to have corrected that.)

Try attracting a bunch of drivers to transit in a city like Houston with “better bus”. It’s Not Gonna Happen, because “better bus” means “slightly better than the existing bus” and the existing bus is just god-awful. It will never, ever, ever be anywhere near as good as even the heavily compromised light-rail starter they did – you know, the one that’s overflowing with passengers.

You are absolutely right that when we compare using a bus system to relying on cars to fulfill certain transportation needs, we should properly account for all the relevant costs associated with the cars. Road damage may well still count against the bus, but another poster above did a good job of summarizing some of the other costs associated with cars.

But of course all I am suggesting is that you have to do the same thing when comparing bus systems to rail systems, or for that matter bus systems to gondola systems, meaning you need to take into account all the associated costs. And again, my point is not that bus systems are always bad–they are very often quite good, and are the best available technology to use in the relevant case. But sometimes there are in fact better alternatives, and we need to understand when and why that is true.

As for urban gondolas, I would suggest people check out The Gondola Project, a blog devoted to the subject with a wealth of information available in the easily-accessed archives. I know you meant your comment in good fun, but I think there is an awful lot of misinformation and misconceptions about the technology, which that joke regrettably reflects. I might also note that gondolas are already in use for urban transportation, so it is really less a matter of waiting and more a matter of whether we are going to expand the menu of options we are considering in these discussions to all the currently available technologies.