05-02-2016, 09:00 AM
With respect to Ottawa, the "use" they got out of their BRT system was because of delays and cost, not "value." The system opened in the mid-80s. A decade later, they were already talking about the need to replace it with LRT. It will have taken almost a quarter century to go from knowing they needed to upgrade, to getting the upgrade. LRT would have been delayed at least in part because "we haven't finished paying for BRT yet." Some of the big consequences are akin to a more stifling version of what Toronto sees with respect to talk of a Downtown Relief Line. Because of how choked the core segments of the system became, both in terms of buses packed full of people and packing the busways full, as well as the delays in the mixed-use portion that saw daily bus chains going for blocks, ridership was stalled, limited, as the city grew and grew.
I lived in Orleans, and around the mid-90s, you'd see half a dozen people at every local-spacing stop for the express collector buses which came every 15 minutes for ~3h peak morning and evening periods, to go with 30 minute service local route to take you to the BRT system. Today, the only route within a 15 minute walk has four buses a day. A day. This, just a few kilometers from two different BRT stations. Had Ottawa been smart, they wouldn't have seen various parts of their system deteriorate, ridership patterns fall off a cliff in ways essential to avoiding car-based consequences. London, of all cities, shouldn't seek to copy a pattern that was very much a negative impact on Ottawa's urban (and largely suburban) form.
I lived in Orleans, and around the mid-90s, you'd see half a dozen people at every local-spacing stop for the express collector buses which came every 15 minutes for ~3h peak morning and evening periods, to go with 30 minute service local route to take you to the BRT system. Today, the only route within a 15 minute walk has four buses a day. A day. This, just a few kilometers from two different BRT stations. Had Ottawa been smart, they wouldn't have seen various parts of their system deteriorate, ridership patterns fall off a cliff in ways essential to avoiding car-based consequences. London, of all cities, shouldn't seek to copy a pattern that was very much a negative impact on Ottawa's urban (and largely suburban) form.