Comment 98176

By highwater (registered) | Posted March 04, 2014 at 11:08:13 in reply to Comment 98167

Your use of studies with possible hidden agendas does cast suspicion. I did some digging into the history of ITDB. In the past, it has partnered with the Transportation Research Board, which itself has an interesting history that nowhere includes any mention rapid transit. In fact, there are numerous references to pavement, asphalt, highways etc. You can guess why they support anything with three different letters - namely BRT.

I think we should be careful about judging the ITDB's 'agenda' solely through the filter of our own debate. There's no doubt that in the Hamilton context, BRT is the more regressive choice, but it would be a mistake to extrapolate from there that the ITDB has a regressive agenda. From what I can tell from my admittedly cursory research, in most of the cities the ITDB has been working with, where the polarization around public transit makes Hamilton's debate look like a peace festival, the choice isn't between LRT and BRT, but rather BRT and more highways, making BRT the progressive choice by far. In that kind of climate, I don't begrudge them their advocacy. They are firmly on the side of rapid transit after all.

While there are legitimate questions about their methodology in this particular study - the most glaring being not factoring in BRT's higher operating costs - there are some important takeaways for Hamilton. As I mentioned in my other comments, the authors make it clear that BRT only rivals LRT in terms of ROI when certain conditions are in place. If we accept the authors' premise that B-line BRT would be just as successful LRT, that doesn't change the fact that those conditions are not in place in two out of the three lines being proposed, significantly diminishing the ROI on an investment that would be at least as costly as B-line LRT.

Given this, if LRT opponents are truly opposed on economic grounds, and not simply anti-urban bias and perceptions of 'elitism', they wouldn't even accept two, let alone three BRT lines as an alternative to one LRT.

Comment edited by highwater on 2014-03-04 11:17:10

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