[PRCo] Re: Pittsburgh 7-Charles Street abandonment

[Shirley Tennyson]

   I see light rail today as the best and least costly way to move
people in corrid- ors with enough passengers, but not too man. New York
City  (Manhattan) would be too many. Half hourly peak bus service would
be too few to convert to light rail, but there is no magivc number of
passen- gers. If the speed gain is sufficient, fewer passengers can be
justfied.                            Let us say it may cost $ 8 per
bus-mile to provide bus service. In San Francisco that may mean only ten
miles per hour with lots of passengers and traffic, so it mmeans that it
costs $ 80 per hour to provide bus service, including front office
costs.  If we load the bus to 62 passengers for the hour (too few, but
easy to figure), it costs  $ 1.29 per passenger.        If we can get a
light rail right-o-way that wi;ll mqke possible 15 miles per hour by
keeping traffic out of the way, and LRT costs $ 150 per car hour, it
will cost $ 10 per mile,25 percent more than bus, but with roomto carry
130 passengers with the same crowding as 62 on the bus. The cost per LRT
passenger will be only $ 100 for the trip because it does nt take an
hour and it carries 130 people at a cost of only 77 cents per passenger.
Huge saving with LRT.
We3 could also build an exclusive bus way instaed of LRT, but they do
not work well.  With no trains and smaller vehicles, there is much
higher labor cost. The Har- bor Freeway Busway iin L.A.attracts only
5,5000 weekday passengers where the parallel Blue LRT line attracts
63,000.  In Pittsburgh, when Overbrook Valley Route was shut down in
1993, the 8,000 rail passengers became 1,500 bus passengers added to the
South Busway.         Articulated buses would change the numbers of
passengersa per bus and re- duce driver costs, but articulateds have
more maintenance cost and accidents while taking more loading timed, so
operate slower. A careful study in L.A. found that articulateds had a
higher cost per passenger tan forty-foot buses.                 I
realize yo asked about interurbans, and so let us look at Saint Louis,
with Metro-Link LRT the same mileage as Pitts burgh to Charleroi and
Roscoe. It is a tremendous success, very low cost to op- erate, and runs
through cornfields on the Bellevue extension.
Portland LRT )MAX) is also almost as long as the Charleroi line in a
city ad counties smaller than Pittsburgh, but it is not too much in open
country.                         I am sure a light rail interurban would
be highly successful if it could operate like San Diego or Baltimore.
Baltimore is as long as the Pittsburgh-Washington line and has some open
country along the way. It is not as successful as Saint Louis or
Portland but it is less costly (per pass- enger-mile) than bus to
operate and draws more riders.
E d   T e n n y s o n