There are absolutely zillions of cities in the world where buses aren’t enough on trunk lines but rapid transit metro would be ridiculous overkill, mostly in the 100k to 500k population segment. And in bigger cities with metros there are many routes where a metro expansion doesn’t make sense but buses aren’t enough.
I mean, this isn’t some theoretical question where the jury is still out there, there are countless examples. Cities everywhere don’t build LRT just for fun and because they have too much money! If there aren’t enough people for LRT that just means the town isn’t big enough, which is fair, or there are too few transit users due to car culture or whatever (eg. the US, which is an outlier).
The rail factor is not a hypothesis, the entire point is that it’s a discovered effect. If you haven’t seen it put to test, you simply haven’t been looking.
As one datapoint, I can simply point to the city where I live [1]: the LRT system that opened in 2021 has become exceedingly popular and effortlessly lifted transit use from the covid slump, with total passenger numbers now much higher than in 2019 and quite a bit higher than the rather conservative projections made when the system was being planned. Headways have already been shortened from 7.5 to 6 minutes to respond to peak hour demand, and extension modules have been ordered to lengthen a part of the fleet of 37m vehicles to 47m, adding 30% to the 260-passenger capacity.
On the other hand, another Finnish city of roughly the same size has been equivocating between LRT and BRT for years and years. Countless reviews have made it clear that essentially the only thing that BRT has going for it is lower up-front investment. It has also become quite clear that the only reason BRT keeps being discussed is that it’s used merely as a political tool to induce analysis paralysis, to delay and hinder any significant transit improvement by those against anything except antiquated car-centric urban design.
I mean, this isn’t some theoretical question where the jury is still out there, there are countless examples. Cities everywhere don’t build LRT just for fun and because they have too much money! If there aren’t enough people for LRT that just means the town isn’t big enough, which is fair, or there are too few transit users due to car culture or whatever (eg. the US, which is an outlier).
The rail factor is not a hypothesis, the entire point is that it’s a discovered effect. If you haven’t seen it put to test, you simply haven’t been looking.
As one datapoint, I can simply point to the city where I live [1]: the LRT system that opened in 2021 has become exceedingly popular and effortlessly lifted transit use from the covid slump, with total passenger numbers now much higher than in 2019 and quite a bit higher than the rather conservative projections made when the system was being planned. Headways have already been shortened from 7.5 to 6 minutes to respond to peak hour demand, and extension modules have been ordered to lengthen a part of the fleet of 37m vehicles to 47m, adding 30% to the 260-passenger capacity.
On the other hand, another Finnish city of roughly the same size has been equivocating between LRT and BRT for years and years. Countless reviews have made it clear that essentially the only thing that BRT has going for it is lower up-front investment. It has also become quite clear that the only reason BRT keeps being discussed is that it’s used merely as a political tool to induce analysis paralysis, to delay and hinder any significant transit improvement by those against anything except antiquated car-centric urban design.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampere_light_rail