Overhead Wire, Relative costs between BRT and Light Rail for the corridor are in the Major Investment Study 2002 report on the ACTransit website. http://www2.actransit.org/planning_focus/brt/brt_details.wu. This report also provides comparison numbers for ridership. The ridership numbers given appear to come from the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR), 2006, for the BRT system, available at the same ACTransit site. While ridership along the BRT route does go from 28,000 to 49,000 (increase of 21,000) the net increase in ACTransit ridership is only 16,000. The other 5000 riders appear to come from other (parallel?) ACTransit routes. Of the 16,000 increase in ACTransit riders, 6,000 come from BART, leaving about 10,000 diverted from cars. Exact numbers vary some depending on the link between BRT and BART at the southern end. So is BRT redundant with BART service? 40% of the new ACTransit riders attracted by the new service come from BART. The energy impact analysis comes from the report cited by V, http://www.nctr.usf.edu/jpt/pdf/JPT%209-3S%20Vincent.pdf. The CO2 emissions information uses a national estimate for CO2 per kWh that is 3 times higher that the average on the West Coast. So correcting for that, the CO2 emissions for the two modes would be about the same in Oakland. Even so, there are other questionable assumptions, such as the same number of passengers being carried by either a light rail vehicle or a BRT vehicle. This in spite of the LRT vehicle being larger and higher capacity, and the ACTransit estimates that indicate that LRT would have higher ridership than BRT (from the MIS). Other assumptions in the report are also open to discussion. So BRT is not likely to be more energy efficient than LRT, but either one is more energy efficient than cars. (Actually, that may not really be the case. Since half of the BRT riders come from other, existing, transit lines, the energy savings may only be applicable to new riders, not to all riders. Unless service is reduced on the parallel lines to make up for the reduced ridership on those lines, the actual impact on energy consumption could go either way. Difficult calculation needing many assumptions.) My larger concern is that ACTransit wants to invest $340M in a system that is an incremental improvement to our transit system, and does little if anything to address the fundamental causes in the decline of transit ridership over the last 50 years, and will worsen traffic due to the loss of a lane for autos. While V says that BRT is an innovative approach, in actuality, it is an evolutionary approach to public transit, and not the fundamental change that is needed. While BRT is more cost effective than LRT, and either is an improvement on use of personal automobiles, neither one really addresses the fact that most people do not take mass transit very often. Robert

Hey V, I've never been on this site but I hear a lot about it over at Becks place. Do you know where I can find the LRT costs compared to the BRT costs? I find the estimates quoted a little hard to swallow. Seems like someone was cooking the books.