GoRaleigh Bus System, now and the future

[keita]

I’m not a fan either, but with the constraints we got, I think this is the best we could get. Back in the R-Line thread, it was mentioned that there’s a hard limit on the budget:

@dtraleigh

The city has $900K a year devoted for this. What else ya got?

So this implies $900k/yr can only fund 15-minute headways in each direction with two buses on the candy cane route. In that case, a complete, bidirectional loop needs at least double the number of buses -and double the budget. Until that can happen, I think this is a good-enough compromise that we’ll just have to live with

Besides, this is another good reason to push for more frequent GoRaleigh/GoTriangle/BRT services:

@Boltman

Wish [a free bus] would fully connect the two ends of downtown.

The R-Line study assumes people will use other buses to make up for that missing side of the loop -but that’s a stretch unless you can make people want to do that. There’s also some chatter about possibly petitioning for studies to make downtown bus services around Triangle downtowns free.

And honestly, even the $900k/yr price tag sounds like a bargain.

The cost to operate a single bus per hour in larger American cities, in general, is like $100-$200/hr. If we assume the cheaper $100/hr for a bus that runs an average of 18hrs/day every day of the year, that’s $657k/year to operate a single bus.

Since the R-Line runs two buses but still keeps a price tag of under $1M, it sounds like we have it pretty well with our cheap capital/operating costs… Obviously, this is a super rough calculation, but it’s still good to know your place.