Are Streetcars Better Than Buses?

hey guys welcome back to the channel so just a heads up this seems like it could be a controversial topic I wish it wasn't a controversial topic but let's be kind to each other in the comments this is just my opinion my humble opinion so it's not necessarily correct but I think I have good evidence behind my opinion so yeah let's get into it now [Music] before we get started I just want to shout out our newest two patrons IRA and Sean thanks so much for supporting us guys it means a lot to us so the topic of today's video is as you probably saw from the thumbnail why streetcars are better than buses now to be perfectly clear that doesn't mean that streetcars are you know always better than buses I don't think that that is necessary for the statement I'm making to be true whether I think the streetcars can offer higher capacity better quality service and honestly also just a more sustainable system than buses can and I'm gonna tell you why in this video now I also want to make something clear when I talk about streetcars I'm not talking about the Oklahoma City streetcar or the Atlanta streetcar or the portland streetcar i don't think that these are really good examples of modern of modern streetcar systems the thing is yes in the united states there's been a number of these new streetcar systems constructed in the recent years but i think that these are largely a development tool not a transportation tool in terms of a modern streetcar network that i want to talk about that would be toronto a city where streetcars have always basically existed as a transportation tool and to be clear functionally there's a big difference between the toronto streetcar network and the new streetcars we see implemented across the United States whoever from a cost basis in terms of actually building these things I don't think there's a huge difference any of the systems that were recently built in the United States could probably have been built just like Toronto system it's the differences of which I'll make clear in just a second whoever they were chosen not to for different reasons and I'll try to explain that now to be clear other cities and different continents and countries call streetcars different things trams etc I'm gonna refer to everything as streetcars in this video but do be clear that not every city refers to the vehicles as the same thing even though they're essentially the same thing I don't want to reference purely European systems because I think there's a argument for people to make in that oh we're not Europe so we can't have european-style systems so I want to talk about Toronto a lot because Toronto is a North American streetcar system that's incredibly successful and that has you know continued to evolve in the current day and age so I think it's a really good example to bring up so first thing I'm gonna do is just go over all the common criticisms that I often hear about streetcars before we get into direct comparisons between buses and streetcars so one of the first ones we often see is that streetcars often operate in mixed traffic and that just can't work well now diving deeper into that point about mixed traffic plenty of the streetcar lines in Toronto that still carry massive numbers of people at least compared to other surface transit routes across North America do so in fully mixed traffic interacting with cars and the roads aren't you know totally blocked two cars plenty of cars and bus traffic as well gets through on these streets streets like College Street and Dundas Street and Queen Street as well so I think the idea that streetcars can exist in a mix right avoid totally false it works in Toronto and it works quite well now of course a lot of people are likely to bring up the point that streetcars can't move around accidents which is an OK point in my personal opinion however I want to point something out if you live a major accident on the street you know enough to close down your streetcar line it's probably a big enough accident that the truth be blocked off anyways to bus traffic etc as well now if you have just a minor accident or a car stuck on the tracks that sort of thing well I mean in a minor accident people are going to pull to the side of the street anyways and I'm not talking really about putting streetcar lines on any you know two lane streets I think four would probably be a minimum number of lanes you would have in addition if there's a car stuck on the street I mean that's a big deal even if you don't have streetcars like you're massively limiting the capacity for throughput on that street so you can get a tote right there in a few minutes no matter what so I don't think that that's necessarily a great argument yes buses can move around but if you have a streetcar system you just plan around having that streetcar system and I think things can work plenty smoothly again they do in Toronto there's delays here and there but generally on a day to day basis the network runs fine even in mixed traffic of course to be clear I'm not a fan of just putting all lines in mixed traffic I don't necessarily think that's the argument that should be made in fact plenty of streetcar lines in Toronto and in other places as well are built in separate writer wings though to be clear that separate right-of-way can just be a painted Lane just like with some BRT systems you don't necessarily need to do all the fancy stuff that's done for some LRT or pre Metro style systems you just need dedicated lanes actually if you look at the King Street project in Toronto which it still offers some limited through traffic for cars the project carries a ton of people and that's just by limiting how much cars can move on the street so even in a limited mixed traffic environment you can have a ton of street car throughput as long as again you're not being car centric it's amazing to me that a lot of transit people and people who appreciate the importance of transit and want to expand transit often make their kind of plans around surface level transit like buses or street cars based on cars and car users when really we should be thinking about transit users since especially in these dense urban corridors it's not hard to have way more people using the transit than using the automobile lanes in addition it's also worth pointing out that a lot of major roads in United States and Canada in dense urban cores still have on street parking so despite having all these massive parking garages underground under many major buildings you still have on-street parking you're still catering to a very small number of people who want to park their cars on major roadways which should be for moving people not for parking cars now something else I want to point out is that as we can see in examples across the United States and Canada in recent years streetcars can be built quite inexpensively now to be we're streetcars and LRT are not equal they're just definitely different things LRT is kind of a hybrid between streetcars and like a pre Metro and you can see that in cities like Seattle and Ottawa which have possibly you could argue kind of light Metro style service with LRT vehicles which are similar to streetcar vehicles streetcars often have a lot less hard infrastructure so you won't see these massive stations you won't see a lot of operations off street that sort of thing and so there's a differentiating factor there and I think by putting in a lot of these major stations and sometimes grade separations and tunnel sections etc that's what blows up the price of LRT you also have the fact that you're building often long platforms because LRT has you know stations instead of being served like a bus if you look at a city like Toronto or you look at other cities like Portland that have you know new streetcar systems you really only need a bus shelter and now I'm not saying that people don't deserve more or whatever but the practical thing especially in Toronto is that service is operated so frequently as it should be unlike many of the u.s. streetcar systems that you don't need this massive station for people to wait in it's no different really than a bus you know the streetcars are coming you know every five minutes or so and so you can always look down the street and see the next car and hence even in wintertime it's just not that big of a deal and people can wait a couple minutes and they'll be fine so that's a way that costs are brought down a lot and kind of the gauge I like to use is that you can look again at many of these cities including Toronto and you can see that the municipal governments alone have been able to fund streetcar extend extensions and what that means is that streetcars are just a tear below something like LRT or metros etc in that you know municipal local government can fund them which is a big deal because what it means is that you don't have to go to the states or provincial level governments to go get funding the projects are smaller there's less red tape they can move more quickly and they can be extended more frequently so having the municipal governments being able to fund these projects is a big benefit now I want to just those us streetcar systems again to be clear as I mentioned before I don't think the intention of pretty much any of them is really moving people if you look at the example which is Portland because Portland was the first pretty much of the new US streetcar systems to be built the the primary driving force behind building it was development and along with many of the other streetcar systems that have been built in the United States development has come it's been very successful at driving new development because it's a great selling point to developers into new perspective residents the big issue I see is that again they're not planned for transportation so a lot of the u.s. streetcars are quite circuitous they go in looping routes they're a lot like the Detroit people mover they're just not great for getting around often again those those loops are one directional so you just doesn't make sense to wait for a streetcar that often again doesn't have great service these are often not run like bus services would be where you have a bus less than every 10 minutes but they're running every 15 every 20 minutes so the service is really kind of a purely image thing it's based on making the street look a certain way and attracting development rather than actually moving people again as I mentioned to a lot of these systems aren't actually operated by transit agencies are operated by city departments of transportation which isn't necessarily a bad thing but the u.s. streetcar systems have been built in recent years some of the ones I mentioned already they're just not operated like local transit which I think they need to be in order to be successful as local transit and they should really be planned in my personal opinion more like bus lines where you have a single linear corridor you don't have this kind of looping pathway because again how often would you see a bus line that's basically just a random you know circulator route through downtown you might see it here and there but it wouldn't be something that a local transit agency would do it would be something for tourists or something that is kind of done by the city it's just a little shuttle bus it's just not something that again a major transit agency would do as well as seeing those low frequencies one final point I want to mention is that there's now a number of street car vehicles available in North America in kind of a range of sizes because of all these new streetcar services that have popped up in the United States there's been a new demand for streetcars so actually there's a number of manufacturers who provide vehicles that can be operated on streetcar services which is something that wasn't necessarily true a couple decades ago including some of the higher capacity options in Toronto as well as other cities once you get to the higher capacity options the streetcars basically are just single train L RVs which is kind of an interesting thing to me now I'm going to get into the contentious part of this video where I kind of say why I think streetcars are better than buses at least in these high capacity scenarios I'm gonna make it perfectly clear I think by no means think that we should just get rid of buses I mean is that really a thing that we could do and replace all bus lines with streetcars no that doesn't make sense buses have a place but much like buses have a place I believe streetcars and tramways also have a place and they serve different kind of areas and they have different niches which they fill and so again I don't think that we need to get rid of all bus lines I just simply think that there's places where we can replace a certain bus line with a streetcar line as I mentioned before - I think that the kind of way we think about streetcars in North America it's very dogmatic it's based on you know we don't want to block traffic we don't want to give up road space or from private vehicles and dedicated to rail or buses for that matter despite the fact that cities like Melbourne and Toronto do it and both cities do it without having major congestion issues beyond what most other North American or western cities with face so now why are street cars better than buses well first of all streetcars have a much lower cost of operation now once you have a streetcar line installed you have a number of factors that reduce the cost of operation first of all streetcar tracks generally actually require less ongoing maintenance than roadways now of course roadways also are used by cars but when you're thinking about it purely in terms of buses versus streetcars well streetcar right-of-ways can actually hand a lot of abuse whereas regular roadway as they require repaving quite frequently that's not to say that there isn't regular maintenance required for streetcar tracks it's just that it's not that significant who are the more significant factors in terms of lower cost of operations are things like fuel screw cars don't obviously consume diesel fuel which the vast majority of buses still do there are trolley buses and electric buses but the majority of cities aren't operating those type of vehicles the reality is that streetcars are just much cheaper to operate in terms of energy because electricity is very cheaply available and electric traction is very efficient compared to fossil fueled powered attraction in addition streetcar vehicles last much longer than buses on average buses last around 20 years for you know a bus that's getting quite old whereas streetcars can easily operate over 30 years now that's not to say that I think again that streetcar should all be operating over 30 years but if you look at our modern vehicles they have a lot of the key amenities things like accessibility and air conditioning whereas I think that they won't necessarily need to be replaced as older vehicles were and if you look again at Toronto the previous streetcar fleet that we had in the city lasted around 40 years before needing to be replaced and largely the CL rvs is fine they were relatively operational there are a few issues but they weren't things that couldn't have ever been fixed so I think it's important to think about that now finally perhaps the biggest thing that reduces the cost of operation is that you just need less of them as is caught commonly cited in the TTC or Toronto Transit Commission reporting and information on average replacing one street car takes about three buses and so if you were to convert streetcar boots to bus routes you'd have to operate buses super frequently as many cities in North America do on those high-traffic routes the thing about this then is that you need to pay three drivers instead of just paying one driver and of course that means you could potentially extend service hours for streetcars because now you have some savings you could deploy that to other service so that people are still driving vehicles it's just that people are provided with more service and that's not really surprising since our on Rails streetcars can be wider and larger because again they're on Rails which means that they can take up more Road space that's available and that way they can have far more capacity now tying into that higher capacity point at a certain point once you start running buses super frequently as you would have to on some of those Toronto streetcar lines if you were to replace them with buses you run into bunching and that's when the light cycles are often shorter than the frequencies are running which you in some cases you need to because say you're running at a five-minute streetcar frequency and you have to do you know three buses for every streetcar well then you're getting into a minute-and-a-half frequency that's gonna lead to major bunching and bunching basically degrades that frequency down and make the whole capacity of the line be significantly reduced and of course service quality which means that at some point when you're in these kind of mixed operations going to lower and lower frequencies is just really difficult and again Toronto is a great reference point here because Toronto has many of the most used bus lines in North America I'm going to mention another one of the most used in a few minutes but again comparing those to streetcar routes on shorter routes streetcars often out-compete those same bus routes and so you can see the capacity is just higher and these service reliability is still quite strong now a small point I want to mention is psychological permanence it's a real effect and it's the fact that people see hard infrastructure like streetcar rails something that is necessitated by streetcars and compared to regular bus routes not BRT but regular bus routes it has a sense for people that this isn't going to be something that's taken away from me in a couple years right when I build development next to street a streetcar route it's likely to stay for at least a decent amount of time and given the way the world is going I don't think we're going to have another phase where we rip out all the streetcar lines like we did back in the mid 20th century and so I think that this permanence point is a real win for streetcars another thing is the better ride quality and this is something I'm surprised more people don't realize as a thing as someone who's personally taken a lot of bus communites in my life even on relatively straight corridors the weaving in and out of to get to stops and the really hard turns that often are necessitated on buses are just really uncomfortable especially as a standing passenger as well as you know bus suspension often being quite rough and hard especially on a lot of newer bus models in comparison I can often ride streetcar routes without even holding on not that I'd recommend that but it just goes to show that streetcars are typically a smoother ride experience and that's good for a number of reasons it also can be attributed to those longer life spans of streetcar vehicles because generally they are facing kind of gentler treatment when they're out on the roads now I want to mention something maybe the elephant in the room if you're Canadian viewer the 99 B Line bus in Vancouver of course you might say buses like the 99 D line can carry massive numbers of passengers in fact the 99 K line route in Vancouver is the most used bus route in Canada or the United States carrying over 55,000 riders per day if you're curious with the most used one in North America is I believe several of the routes in CD MX in New Mexico are more news these are heavy BRT routes and so those are the most used in North America the reality about the 9090 line is this though it's still a bus route and that's a limitation you see the 9b line is basically packed to the gills at rush hour buses are coming every three minutes and that pretty much gets you to the peak of what you can offer with a bus service in fact you typically can't get much higher in terms of service without frequency unless you go to full Metro with full automatic train control etc so once you get to those type of head waves the only option you really have is to increase the per vehicle capacity by going from articulated buses to something like a large flexi streetcar which has around twice the capacity of such a vehicle I should also point out that the 99p line is not some miraculous unicorn I hate to be that Toronto centric person then again I'm from Vancouver but a number of the suburban bus routes in Toronto carry almost as many riders as the 1990 line and they do so without necessarily using exclusively articulated buses and without nearly as much prioritization on the roadway it just goes to show that bus routes when the service and land use is often conducive to this to ridership buses can be successful in pretty much any context now compared to the 99p line the 504 King which has slightly more prioritization and does operate through the downtown core of Toronto carries over 80,000 riders per day so that's over 30,000 more than the 99b line now again it does go through a dense area but I'm really talking more about maximum capacity as we know the 99b line is being replaced with a full Metro service but if we're talking about covering a ton of the dense urban cores of cities with rapid frequent transit it's just not practical to do it entirely with Metro services and if buses can only offer around 50,000 plus people for Direction per hour then capacity is basically going to be hard limited at that level now there is the argument that you could just implement the RT but the reality is that on a relatively narrow urban corridor the type of BRT you're implementing just isn't going to increase capacity damage BRT with high capacity often requires kind of a fully dedicated right-of-way and multiple lanes so you can have passing etc something which streetcar lines don't require you to have because the vehicles again themselves are larger in addition streetcars like the ones used in Toronto can have more doors which enables a shorter dwell time which again helps with keeping frequencies higher rather than buses which have roughly half as many doors as a streetcar the point I want to make about where I think streetcars make the most sense is the dense urban corridors to be perfectly clear I think if you were to take the 99 V line and say that route had streetcar tracks on it miraculously overnight I still think the streetcars could provide a better service than the current 99 V line bus because the vehicles are simply larger and operating at a reasonable local transit frequency something which happens again with the Toronto streetcar system but which doesn't happen with new u.s. streetcar systems you can get easily up to the capacities you would need to carry far more people than something like the 1990 line however I don't again think that's the place to put streetcar routes because a long corridor like Broadway does make sense with Rapid Transit because the distances between stations can be covered much more quickly if you have just a few stops and you have a fully grade-separated right-of-way where I think three cars make the most sense is as with King Street in Toronto in dense urban corridors think areas like the downtown core of Vancouver along the waterfront area is false Creek the Arbutus Greenway so places that already have right of ways and places that are really dense the reality is that as I mentioned before in North America in general urban boulevards are very wide often they have space for car parking on the sides and so implementing streetcar routes down the center of wider streets I'm talking six lanes at least means that you could easily have a dedicated right-of-way for the streetcars down the center and then on four lane roads you could implement more of the King Street approach where you have primarily transit dedicated lanes in the center and some limited local traffic for automobiles in addition some of these cities also have already put space aside for future streetcars Vancouver being a good example where there's a number of medians that have been built that are basically planned for future streetcar use and in places like that it's really easy to have that dedicated medium streetcar operation now the main reason I think that these streetcar networks make a ton of sense in the dense urban Knows think that downtown Peninsula Vancouver or the core areas of Seattle or downtown Toronto is that they offer something which neither buses nor metros can offer currently when compared to buses you have a higher maximum capacity without having to absolutely blast the streets full of buses every couple minutes which again rapidly degrades because of that high frequency so you have a higher capacity than buses and you a cheaper cost to build than metros a much cheaper cost often I would say serving building a single high-capacity subway line we'd probably cost about as much as implementing a grid of streetcar routes now I think we both need both of those things but streetcar routes can cover a lot of a lot more ground than a single high-capacity line and can operate really well for that last mile getting people from the station to their place of work etc along with things like bikes and walking so to close essentially what I'm saying is that streetcars don't need to replace all buses but there's places where streetcars make more sense than buses and the argument that streetcars are stupid or streetcars block traffic or streetcars are just you know development tools or it's you know it's like the monorail from The Simpsons misses the point that shree cars and trams etc can offer something which buses can't it can offer a higher quality of transit as well as higher capacity in a way that bridges the gap between traditional bus service and full rapid transit streetcars artist LRT and I think increasingly I'm starting to believe that streetcars make more sense than LRT because at least with a streetcar you have a much lower cost to build words with LRT you often have such high costs because of doing things like big grade separations and dedicated right-of-way and stuff that you might as well just build a fully automated metro system like copenhagen or vancouver have done so I think streetcars fill a nice niche where it's higher capacity than buses lower costs than full rapid transit and where I think streetcars do better than buses thanks for watching the video guys and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 76,753

Keywords: transit, transportation, toronto, streetcar, bus, buses, tram, train, rail, railway, railfan, ttc, portland, vancouver

Id: BNatNSV8GBE

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2020