Why should the Cascade Policy Institute have all the fun?
Occasionally, I take some time to swat various libertoonian auto über alles groups with the 2x4 of pure reason over their screamingly non-libertarian support for the state-sponsored automobile monopoly, but you might notice that I never to the same for very many mass transit advocacy groups. Sure, I've screamed bloody murder over the way that the cost of building simple trolley lines has shot up from the sensible US$8-12 million/mile costs of the earlier lines in the USA to the batshit insane US$60-100 million/mile costs of modern lines, but I haven't yet aimed my bile at any advocacy groups.
Poison pen, meet Light Rail Now and one of the most amazingly stupid "pro-trolley" articles I've ever had the misfortune to run across. The article is what they'd like to pretend is a factcheck on the Los Angeles MTA's conversion of a railroad line into a dedicated busway (the Orange Line in the San Fernando Valley.) It's fairly chock-full of illusionary "facts" proving that trolley lines are better than buslines, most of which don't pass the laugh-test (apparently not having crossing gates on a busway is a fault of the busway, not of the stupider than dirt construction conglomerate that designed and built the line,) but there are a few things that are worthy of special attention:
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(photo from the lightrailnow website.)This, apparently, is a horrible safety hazard. It's two busses passing each other on a 40mph road, which, at least according to lightrailnow, is horribly unsafe because the busses could *lunge* at each other and have a head-on collision.
The teeny detail that the world is *full* of two-way traffic and transit busses somehow manage to keep from constantly splatting each other is conveniently left out here. This is just like the monorail kooks saying "look, there's never been a monorail accident *evar!*, not like those EVIL TROLLEYS which are always leaping off the track and crushing babies and kittens!"
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(photo from the lightrailnow website.)You might look at this picture and say "nice. The station stop has a siding so busses can stop to discharge passengers without blocking the mainline. Good for the LAMTA to insist on this rudiment of good design." and think that this is one benefit of busses because you don't have to maintain a pair of switched so that you can do the same with a trolley line. (that's not strictly true, because the CA&E was able to run express service to the Loop by being switched around the local cars on their runs from Garfield Park to the Loop.) But, no, this is apparently a *bad thing*, because it makes the station wider than a station on a trolley line.
I'd much rather ride a trolley than a bus, and I scream bloody murder whenever a transit agency proposes to save a few dollars in construction costs by building a busway instead of a trolley line, but these arguments are insultingly stupid. People drive on two-way highways and streets all the time, and being able to switch off the mainline when you arrive at a station is an unqualified Good Thing. If a trolley line wants to run express and local service, you've got to have a way of getting the express trains around the local trains, and switching the locals into a siding is just as good as the traditional rapid transit approach of building one or two extra lines for the express traffic.
If this is the best you can do to advocate for trolleys, please just don't say anything. There is enough irrational trolley advocacy out there without starting to sound like a monorail fanatic claiming (contrary to all of the evidence) that a monorail line is cheaper to build than a trolley line and that it will get 10x the ridership.
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There are monorail enthusiasts and monorail fanatics. I consider myself a monorail enthusiast (it’s a railroad, so what’s not to love?), at least of the actual mass transit monorails (including the Alweg line in Seattle, which may be teetering on the edge of being an amusement park ride but at least it uses proper-sized transit vehicles [with railfan seats like G-d himself intended.])
The Monorail Society (you won’t see a link to tMs on any of my pages, because, at least back when I had them bookmarked, I developed the very strong impression that the vast bulk of their membership didn’t care so much about putting in monorails as they did about removing trolley lines, and I don’t really need to link to that sort of site)) is, alas, one of the organizations that I file under the kook category. I still read the tMs webpages back in the days when the hideously overpriced N/S Seattle trolley line was foundering under its own weight and the monorail backers were pushing their citywide monorail scheme, and I saw far too many articles on the tMs pages claiming that a monorail could be put in at <US$25m/mile contrary to any real-world evidence. I argue that trolley lines can be put in at <US$25m/mile because they occasionally are (and then the followup lines mysteriously shoot up to US$60m/mile, and are equally mysteriously overbuilt to the point where you could run a TGV on them, but that’s not an artifact of it being a trolley line,) but the low-priced claims for the cost of monorails were wildly at variance with the price of every completed elevated railroad project.
I actually sent email (commenting that I felt they were being editorially dishonest) to the editors at tMs, and got fairly comprehensively blown off by them. Eh. If I wanted that sort of dishonesty I’d join the Cascade Policy Institute.
It’s well known that private ROW is better for keeping schedules, and that grade separation is safer than crossings. But it’s expensive and can be obtrusive (look at Boston and NYC for the fate of their elevated railways, and why BART goes underground when it goes through Berkeley.)
I don’t like automated mass transit, but it’s certainly not a monorail-only thing (are there any automated monorails in the USA? Jacksonville?) as the (small) handful of VAL airport lines, other airport people movers, BART, and heavens knows what else out there proves. But in any case, when you get to the realm of fully grade separated automated rapid transit, you’re talking about a completely different league than an at-grade operation like a tramway or a busway (where the main difference, aside from popular opinion, is that busses don’t have nearly the capacity of trains, even if you pack the busses really close together.)
And lightrailnow’s dishonest look at things that are common (two-way traffic) and things that the MTA did right (pull-outs at the stations, so express traffic isn’t bottled up behind a stopped vehicle) is pretty spectacularly offensive, so it deserves to be pointed and laughed at. I swatted the monorail fanatics en passant because that’s the last time I saw this sort of intellectual dishonesty in print about transit issues.
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Well, actually, most monorail “kooks” don’t argue that trolleys jump out and hit things. Most of us argue the advantages of grade-separated transit (which monorail always is) over in-traffic transit (which trolleys, light rail, and buses often are).
If you want to grade-separate your buses, a la the Orange Line in LA, then you’re pretty even on the safety issue. On the other hand, a number of light rail lines around the country that run on the street regularly get into accidents with passenger vehicles. This is usually the fault of stupid drivers or pedestrians, but the result is still injury or death to the public and, more importantly, delays to the transit line.
As for monorail “fanatics” who talk about the cost of building, I’m not sure who the incorrect folks are who say that monorail is cheaper to BUILD than trolleys or buses. That’s certainly almost never the case.
HOWEVER, there’s plenty of data to bear on two other pro-monorail points:
1) While grade-separated transit is more expensive to build initially, the ability to run automated saves on the cost of drivers with salaries and benefits, which is one of the largest ongoing operations & maintenance costs for any system. Of course, other transit besides monorail can be run automated; and monorails can be run with drivers.
2) In many places, data shows that fixed rail systems draw more transit users than buses, and grade-separated systems draw more transit users because of the time certainty that you cannot otherwise get. Buses are always going to be cheaper and more flexible to build, but they will almost always get bogged down in the same traffic that prompted the need for transit in the first place.