ION Stage I: what would you do differently?

[Bytor]

It's quite reasonable to say we could have spent significantly less to get BRT that's just as good, or somewhat more to get a system that's much better.

Not really, no.

BRTs only seem cheaper, but they are not.

First off is the staffing issue. They require more drivers because the vehicles have a lower capacity, and more mechanics because internal combustion vehicles are more complex and more difficult to maintain. That leads to higher staffing costs.

Second is the busway. Sure, $140M for 72 lane⋅km worth of busway looks a lot cheaper than the $540-something million contract to GrandLinq for the tracks, but that doesn't take into account maintenance. The no defunct Charles St Terminal in it's 30ish year lifespan needed to be repave four times because of the wear and tear from all the busses. If you took the bus and saw those rebuilds, you saw how they laid concrete underpadding at more than just where the busses stopped and sat, so it's reasonable to assume that the BRT busway would require a similar level of care and frequency of repaving. The initial build plus having to redo it 3 more times over the next 30 years then equals or exceeds the cost of building the tracks.

Third is the energy cost. Doing some research I see that trams use about 1.1kWh/km so roughly 40kWh for a loop. Blair Allen told me in 2017 that GRT used about 9.2M litres of diesel fuel for 16.3Mkm travelled. That means three buses doing a loop the same size of ION Stage 1 is roughly 60L for a loop. Even for the large consumers, 1 kWh of electricity costs less than 1 L of diesel.

For those reasons, BRTs are only cheaper in the short term and when ridership is under the threshold of the LRT's higher fixed operating costs. That threshold in North America varies between 5,000 and 10,000 riders a day, based on local costs for these things, and most seem to center around 7,000/day.

So since our system has (pre-pandemic) more than 14,000 riders per day on average and we're operating on a md-term 30 year horizon, LRT is cheaper than BRT for us.