With gasoline prices around $4 per gallon, more Washington commuters are leaving their cars at home and taking the bus to work. To meet the increased demand, Metro officials recently announced plans to add 18 new express bus routes — also known as Bus Rapid Transit — and inadvertently illustrated exactly what’s wrong with current rail expansion plans.
The new buses will be 20 percent faster than ordinary buses because they will make a limited number of stops and carry transponders that extend green lights from three to five seconds at busy intersections, both hallmarks of BRT. Incorporating another BRT feature — running buses that originate in the suburbs down HOV lanes — would speed things up even more.
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Metro expects the expanded express bus service to attract 10 million new “daily riders” (5 million actual commuters, assuming they ride both ways.) Compare that number with ridership projections for Dulles Rail, a heavy rail extension in Northern Virginia that is expected to attract just 85,700 “daily riders” (42,850 actual commuters), or the Purple Line light rail project in suburban Maryland, whose 68,000 projected “daily riders” is a fraction of the new express bus service’s. In terms of attracting new riders to mass transit, BRT is an obvious winner, and the heavy and light rails are losers. The Federal Transit Administration notes that BRT can also reduce the capital costs of mass transit by up to 75 percent, and operating costs per revenue mile by up to 60 percent. BRT is clearly the victor in the cost-effectiveness category as well.
Metro officials themselves estimate that each of the 18 new Metro Extra routes will cost $1 million annually. That compares with the $5.1 billion currently estimated for the 23-mile Dulles Rail project and $1.75 billion needed to build the 16-mile Purple Line. The added tax burden on local residents to build and maintain them will soon dwarf any spikes in gasoline prices they are likely to encounter. The Heritage Foundation points out that the capital cost to attract each new rider to mass transit exceeds $15,000 — “enough to lease each new transit rider two BMW 328i convertibles for life.” Spending close to $7 billion to attract just 76,850 new passengers to Metrorail is one of the biggest wastes of tax dollars imaginable. Especially since there’s a much better BRT alternative that even Metro itself now endorses.
