Fair point. Also a way of classification that I completely omitted inside my mind during previous days.

Also how swirly is the bus route you’d replace by tram, light rail or whatever?

I would argue they’re not equal. Bus makes a bad replacement for a tram and tram can’t really replace the bus if there are no tracks. The reason why I was asking is because Essen and Mühlheim a.d. Ruhr plus some nearby areas have got sections where trams aren’t confined to just the populated areas and do not have many stops and outside the city core they aren’t Stadtbahn, but are that and much more outside the urban areas, act part of the way like the good old Strassenbahn but are marked as Stadtbahn. I guess I don’t really have a point here, just rambling. But really there’s big difference between what you can offer on rails (if you don’t make stupid planning decisions and your system isn’t falling into disrepair) and by buses. Yes, they’re comparable mostly in the way that they’re both moving dozens of people per unit. In everything else, how comparable are they?

I was referring to the numerous options that exist alongside the said rail option in most real world places. But yes, most of the time the bus is the worse option of them two. Less accessible, economical etc.

Which then again is too “techy” for the average person. We both are less likely to be the average person, see.

This video is so full of American stereotypes about transit and bad examples of what is considered improvement because you’re having 10k instead of 3k riders per day in a city with an urban area of more than 600k people?! I think you could have a pretty sensible network that better serves people with the money poured in the UVX. The initial cost of the BRT is higher than that of light rail but with 10k riders per day do you even need a BRT? BRT also is not direct replacement for the tram or light rail, it doesn’t offer the same capacity and ride comfort. Also the queue jumps mentioned in the video are potentially lethal to cyclists.

With good planning of infrastucture this is less of a problem. I say this as someone who’s suffered minor head injury and minor TBI because of the mentioned problem. Only reason for this was I was obeying the law in a place where the only legal place to cycle was in this case the most dangerous one too, and where I had cycled numerous times before without an incident. Now it luckily has a separate path for cyclists, and soon the tram tracks are located in a place where you’d have to do mad stunts to “get into the groove” (no pun intended).

Short answer: no.

You can charge electric buses at termini though. Albeit this doesn’t change the challenges much. The electric buses are best suited for lines where the higher capacity isn’t needed and where the line is not likely to be longer than a little over 15 km.

You wouldn’t even have to go for the “replacing the S-Bahn” to show how ludicrous a BRT is as a suggestion, unless you’re not paying the constructors and drivers a living wage, which is why it makes sense in say Colombia and not in Germany…just think about replacing the M-lines of Berlin tramways with a BRT. It would have to be couple meters wider, would be terribly unreliable and inefficient, not to speak of noisy and bumpy. Now who would want to have that? Not to mention how much the upkeep of two lanes of dedicated BRT costs vs. maintenance of steel on steel rails and catenary. (Most of the time you’d find the latter to be cheaper.) In Helsinki, Finland we are currently waiting for a new tram/light rail option to replace a bus service that should have been a modern tram/light rail line in the first place: https://raidejokeri.info/en/ In the neighbour municipality Vantaa some parties were trying to push for a BRT option but the independent research suggested light rail/tram option to be the best and this is what was chosen: https://www.vantaa.fi/en/housing-and-environment/traffic-and-transport/vantaa-light-rail (they call it light rail but in some ways it’s also reasonable to call it a tram)

This is a common misbelief. Trams and light rail usually have points where the units can go around if one unit has derailed, unless the unit has tipped over, which in itself is very very rare. Good planning is crucial. “A better solution uses corridors dedicated to buses that are electric powered.” Nope, nope, nope. You have to present arguments to this claim, maybe then I can be bothered to counterargument such nonsense.

I thought letbane was not bad. What issues are you referring to?

If you would demolish all the other options, then it would de facto do just that. But nobody has even suggested the kind of baffoonery.

Tram can have both, even on a single line.

Have you actually ever seen the tram network in North Rhine and Westphalia, Germany? Also in many places in the world the replacement of trams by buses has been since seen as a mistake and there are plenty of examples of extensive new trams networks introduced and in planning in cities where they got rid of them in 1960s.

Most tram systems aim for 5 - 7.5 minute frequency on trunk lines during peak hours. Usually induced demand works here if it’s more convenient than sitting in a car. Busses quite often are a little unreliable when it comes to any kind of attempts to schedule even with dedicated lanes, since they spend more time at the stops loading and unloading passengers and you need more of them compared to trams. Then there’s an argument to be made about public mass transportation: It should provide a service that is good for the city and the people and in a well designed system subsidies aren’t going to waste even if you’re unable to measure any profit. Ridership and travel patterns matter the most. Not all rail is equal either. The available options are from cheap (which is not same as bad) to expensive: from tram systems on street level to “heavy” rail in tunnels. The tram is very versatile and often the most affordable way of providing reliable service when combined with busses on lines where the demand is really low. If you need a bus more often than once every ten minutes and/or they’re packed to the brim during rush hours you probably should think about ditching the fears of “overbuilding” and start planning for more capacity and frequency with a tram line. In your country this might be different but in most developed countries the drivers are not unsignificant expense and trams reduce the amount of drivers needed, they have lower power consumption compared to buses and are mostly more reliable than buses. Also the ridership usually prefer a tram if the option is provided and it’s not super slow (which is rare). Then again, if it’s built in the right place -> induced demand.

We’ve even got them in Finland and we only have two cities with a tram network. Otherwise I’ve seen them a lot in Germany and newer systems tend to have them more often than older ones.

It’s also beneficial for users of the systems, most of which are non-investors, that the lines do not change ever so often and the stops don’t vanish or move several hundred meters.