> cheaper than trains (and therefore lower environmental impact)
How does that work? For the same amount of capacity, vans are not and probably never will be cheaper. Steel wheels on rails, with massive capacity, is just drastically more efficient, even with 0 driver costs. You'll still have much more maintenance (the tires, breaks, road) to do with a much higher number of vehicles.
I've yet to see a convincing argument that trains are cheaper than busses (especially when you consider that most of a bus's route (in the USA) would be on "free" roads).
Trains can certainly HOLD more people than a bus, and I hate buses with a passion normally reserved for religious arguments, and trains are Choo-choo, but they are expensive as all hell.
If the bus is using "free" roads, then it's forced to compete for space with general traffic and likely to perform far worse than BRT or trains that don't have to do this. Worse performance/speed/frequency => lower ridership => worse profitability => calls to cancel the "wasteful" bus etc.
The only way out IMO is that we have to stop ripping off the public by giving away unlimited road space for free.
> I've yet to see a convincing argument that trains are cheaper than busses (especially when you consider that most of a bus's route (in the USA) would be on "free" roads).
For a given capacity requirement, in a dense city, they're cheaper. The biggest costs of an urban train line are 1) building stations on expensive land 2) driver salaries, and buses are worse on both aspects; you need much more station space to load/unload the same number of people from buses than from trains, and buses carry far fewer passengers per driver.
> If they weren't why would BRT exist at all?
As far as I can tell BRT is a spook, a way for the road lobby to stop cities building rail. Has it ever actually worked out well for passengers?
Bus lifespan is 15-20 years max and needs tons of maintenance during that time. Trains last 40 years and go 100,000 miles+ between failures.
Trains are a bigger upfront investment, but are cheaper in the long run, especially once capacity is factored in. You need a lot of busses to equal moderate sized trains.
Busses have their place, but not as the backbone for rapid transit in even moderate sized urban areas.
BRT trades CAPX for OPEX. In Latin America where BRT is hugely successful capital is expensive and labour is cheap, so hiring a ton of drivers is easy. In high labour costs markets like the US, Canada, and Europe BRT falls apart. It's often all transit agencies think they can get funding and support for so it's pushed, but it's way too easy to cut back BRT attributes like signal priority, dedicated lanes, and all door boarding to end up with just a bus with a fancy livery.
It's quite easy to make a profit from a bus system that operates in peak commuter hours on peak commuter routes. It's virtually impossible to make a profit from one that has a public service obligation.
The key benefit of BRT is that they have a dedicated right-of-way without conflicts with other traffic just like train tracks with full grade separation. So to do that, BRT suddenly no longer has free roads. You now need dedicated BRT-only roads.
This will depend on density and what's already built. An extreme case: it wouldn't make sense to replace a large, rural school district's bus fleet with trains.
All trains, tracks, and stations are specially designed and built, which makes them very expensive. There is no mass-produced off-the-shelf solution like with cars and roads.
Trains are unbeatable for inland freight between limited destinations, but don't make much sense for current day commuting or traffic patterns.
This is not really true. There are absolutely things in the rail system that are as “mass produced” as roads are. Railway platforms for example are a highly standardised form that has many other applications (loading and inspection bays, walkways etc.), trains are actually not only mass produced (e.g. by Bombardier) but are actually leased by their operators in Europe; there are five or six, I think, main ROSCOs —- rolling stock companies —- in the UK for example.
There is a notable exception that might distort techie perception on this issue: BART. It implements many of its own standards, even down to track gauge. But it is absolutely an outlier (standardised track gauge, ironically, being the USA’s main contribution to the development of the railways, which it was otherwise late to).
Almost everywhere else has rather interchangeable infrastructure and a lot of trans-national businesses.
> but are actually leased by their operators in Europe; there are five or six, I think, main ROSCOs —- rolling stock companies —- in the UK for example.
Nah, this is a UK absurdity because they UK decided to privatise their railways in the worst possible way - every single part (rail infrastructure, operations, rolling stock) was privatised in a local monopoly manner. The rolling stock owners could lease to multiple different operators, so there was some limited competition on that front (probably eviscerated by the need for the ROSCOs to have a profit margin, on top of the fact that there were 10 of them, which meant reduced economies of scale both at acquiring but also maintaining those trains).
They're currently trying to nationalise some parts, after already nationalising the infrastructure (because people died due to bad maintenance due to misaligned incentives - maintenance doesn't bring profits).
But other than that, rolling stock leasing mostly exists in freight.
> trains are actually not only mass produced (e.g. by Bombardier)
But yes, trains of all types are mass produced by companies such as Alstom (which were already massive and also bought Bomboardier's train arm), Siemens, Stadler, etc. They can be customised (size, features, etc.), but e.g. the Alstom Metropolis line of metro trains can be found all over the world.
There is definitely leasing of freight and passenger trains in mainland Europe, albeit not on the UK scale -- there are at least thousands of leased passenger trains in Europe as I had understood it, including some trains leased by predominantly UK-based ROSCOs like Beacon, AFAIK.
But admittedly that comment was mostly my brain blipping while creating that sentence by settling on the old, broader definition of "Europe" where we used to be significant and that I sometimes use when talking to Americans, hence the subclause clarification about the UK within it.
The point I was getting to is that outside the USA (which definitely has nationally-specific rail vehicles like Amtrak and BART) things are broadly commoditised and relatively off-the-shelf, both in the rail-specific hardware sense and in the wider construction sense.
I don't think there is anything particularly different between building a road and building a railway line in terms of construction skills, and indeed where major roads and rail in the UK are concerned there's at least half a dozen or so major construction firms doing both, right? Clancy, Balfour Beatty, Octavius, Eurovia, Babcock etc. (and those are mostly just names I remember seeing out of train windows)
The thing I am referring to is actually mentioned in there -- the true defining event for rail standardisation as a business decision is mentioned here in more detail:
It was a pretty staggering achievement to switch over with so little disruption, and had such rapid, obvious benefits that it kind of ended the notion that keeping entrenched separate gauges could have any merits that outweighed their disadvantages -- it's really the event that made standard gauge the de facto standard.
Things would have taken a generation longer without it, because this was just a plainly capitalistic decision that proved itself essentially instantly.
(Nearest modern equivalent: iMac having no floppy drive and USB)
There are off the shelf trains, tracks, and stations already. It's one of the key ways many european and asian operators deliver tons of transit for the dollar.
How does that work? For the same amount of capacity, vans are not and probably never will be cheaper. Steel wheels on rails, with massive capacity, is just drastically more efficient, even with 0 driver costs. You'll still have much more maintenance (the tires, breaks, road) to do with a much higher number of vehicles.