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Is this not a segregated streetcar? What makes the ride quality so low? Bumpy?
I guess that because there's a small backlash between the two guide wheels and the guide rail. It makes the tram shake left and right continuously. Premature rutting is another issue since guided buses always ride on the same spot of the roadway. But the ride is already quite rough with brand new systems.
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Originally Posted by nei
Weirdly, the public transit agency of Nantes is partially privately owned. I don't think public transit is profitable in Nantes. So an agency that gets government funds has private shareholders? Don't get how that works, maybe it's an arrangement normal in France.
Many privatized things are funded by taxpayer dollars. Privatized prisons, for example, clearly are not making their money from the inmates.
Yes. Case in point, city buses and streetcars are manufactured by private companies, who are contracted by the government. Because that is what private companies are good at, and what they are for. They specialize in making things, or providing specialized services. But private companies should not be running our government. That is the job of elected public officials not corporate CEOs.
(Don't want to get off-topic but there appears to be no evidence private prisons actually cost less than public ones. See link below. That's all I'll say about that.)
I find it very odd how BRT is supposed to always have its own lane (according to some Internet posters) where light rail often does not. Nantes Busway, for example, runs in mixed traffic. So I guess from that standpoint, people actually prefer regular buses as having higher quality because Nantes is fake BRT, again, according to Internet posters.
Anyone with transit chops (which isn't me) seems to consider the fake BRT Nantes Busway to be actual BRT. I agree with them and disagree with the Internet posters who consider it a regular bus.
To qualify as rapid transit, or at least approach that level, an LRT route needs to run predominantly in its own right of way. Some stretches of street running don't automatically disqualify it, but if it's entirely street based, then what you've got there is a streetcar, not a rapid transit route.
I'm no expert, but from looking at the article the results seem rather ambiguous.
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BusWay did better than tram on comfort;
Tram did better than BusWay on service level and network coverage
When these are both allowed for thre was a residual preference for BusWay over tram.
It doesn't seem like a smashing victory for BRT, although Nantes isn't a very large city or metro area to begin with.
So I take it you would be opposed to taxpayer-funded roads and highway construction?
In theory, I hold to strong libertarian (please note the uncapitalized 'l') beliefs; but just as I can understand the need for a societal "safety net" (but under tight local control -- to weed out the small minority in every community which seeks to make a career of indolence and to discourage bureaucratic empire-building) so do I recognize that much of our transport infrastructure simply is not suited to private development. And like it or not, certain sections of our urbanized areas have become so congested that further expansion of the highway network is not practical.
The problem is that transportation, like most facets of our daily lives, has been caught up in our nation's current polarization.
So, what? You have an article that forgot that Ocean-Escondido was already previously built and therefore infers that already built lightrail can be cheaper? Kind of a duh moment. Sprinter is also, by the way, only at 70% of predicted ridership after the first year of service (2009, which actually turned into 2010 because it took twice as long to finish as anticipated).
Using existing track is good where feasible. It wasn't feasible with Orange Line.
I don't see how it can be made any clearer than that.
Your second post was clear, your first post lacked any clear connection to the topic. At least I couldn't tell how it had to do with the OP, it read as an unrelated political rant.
Swift BRT (Snohomish County, WA) runs mostly in mixed traffic and is called BRT as well. RapidRide (King County) however, does not use the BRT moniker in its name. RapidRide is, however, referred to as BRT by FTA, King County Metro, etc. I don't have great familiarity with the system, but it's predominantly maybe even exclusively run in mixed traffic. Again, some Internet posters definitely call it out as being fake BRT but I'd go with FTA and King County Metro.
BRT is ranked bronze, silver or gold depending on the quality of ROW, off-board fare collection, level boarding, and signal priority where there are conflicts with cars.
The US doesn't have any gold BRT and AFAIK, the Healthline in Cleveland is the only BRT to get silver.
BRT gets thrown around a lot - like the MBTA Silver Line - and they're just not BRT. Even some of the bronze BRT systems are questionable.
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