ED GLAESER: There's a joke that graduate students

tell which is that 40 years of transportation economics at Harvard,

maybe it's been 50 now, can be boiled down to four words, bus good,

train bad.

Now that is assuredly a caricature.

But we'd have to admit there's a certain modicum of truth

in this, which is both about skepticism about the often very over the top

claims that are made about rail and, I think, true enthusiasm for the often

underrated bus.

But let's start with the rail side.

You're the author of "The Dark Side of Light Rail"

which took on the Darling of the 1980s for this.

And certainly you like me have sat at the foot of John Meyer who

was the father of transportation economics,

and whose book, "The Urban Transportation Problem,"

started very much economists on the road of questioning rail.

Tell us about rail.

Tell us about why passenger rail isn't always

a great fit for at least American cities.

JOSE GOMEZ-IBANEZ: One of the things to recognize

is that passenger rail carries a fraction of the total public transport

trips in American cities.

Even in a city like Boston, the bus is 50% of all public transport trips.

And commuter rail and light rail and heavy rail are 50%-- the other 50%.

And if you think about other lower density cities,

public transport is provided entirely by the bus.

And critics of the bus and proponents of the rail

argue that buses can never deliver the kind of quality of service

that rail does that people just prefer rail.

And I think that's because what they have in mind is comparing buses

operating in mixed traffic in streets with rail systems

that are completely segregated from traffic

and thus can achieve higher speeds.

And if you allow buses the same kind of privileges, which is something

called bus rapid transit, one of the most important innovations

in public transport in the last 30 or 40 years.

But if you allow them to operate on a protected right of way

with stops that are not really stops, but more like stations

where you can pay your fair in advance and there's high platform

boarding that's fast and debarking that's fast,

when you compare those kinds of systems with rail systems,

the quality of the bus service is at least as good if not if not better.

GLAESER: So this is this for me is sort of one of the great ah ha

moments of my Arcadian wall that this idea

that there's really very little that you can do with a train

that you can't do with a bus in a tunnel or on a dedicated line.

Where did that idea come from?

Was it was it originally to them?

Or was it in the air for transportation economics before them?

GOMEZ-IBANEZ: Well, I think there are two routes of it.

One was we were building expressway systems in the United States.

And some bus advocates developed the idea of the freeway flyer,

express buses between the suburban residential areas and the downtown.

And those turned out to be about the only buses that showed a lot of growth

in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

GLAESER: Were they dedicated lanes or no?

They were just--

GOMEZ-IBANEZ: No, because the freeways were generally not that congested.
So they weren't dedicated.

And then in South America, the city of Coritiba

invented this idea of bus rapid transit, essentially,

designing a bus system so that it mimicked

the surface characteristics of a train.

And that idea was ignored, I think, for a while--

John Kane and John Meyer were attuned to it-- until Bogota developed--

GLAESER: TransMilenio.

GOMEZ-IBANEZ: --the TransMilenio system, yeah.

GLAESER: Right.

So where did Coritiba get the idea?

Did it come from and inspired mayor there?

What is it?

GOMEZ-IBANEZ: Yes, a mayor whose name I forget, Jaime Lerner, I think--

GLAESER: Jaime Lerner.

GOMEZ-IBANEZ: --who was by training an architect

and who did a bunch of wonderful things with his city,

made a park system, in addition to developing this new transport system.

But it really took off in developing countries, BRT, Bus Rapid Transit.

So that now there's some 100, 120 cities that have

BRT systems in developing countries.

And we have a BRT system in Boston, the silver line.

And they have BRT-like services in New York and Los Angeles.

GLAESER: Although the complaints that the silver line is misleadingly

presented as a rail alternative are rife in our city, right?

I mean, the users are frequently, you know, kvetching in some way about it.

But it's a great system, right?

I mean it's--

What do the economics of this look like?

What are they sort of relative costs of BRT versus traditional heavy rail

or light rail or passenger rail?

GOMEZ-IBANEZ: Well, there's another myth about buses.

Which is the myth that they cost more to operate than rail systems.

And the idea that people have in mind that there

is a bus, a 40 foot bus with one driver per 50 or 60 passengers max.

Whereas with a rail system, you could have a train of eight cars,

each carrying a hundred passengers and so

you'd have 800 passengers behind one driver.

But the reality is that you have to spend a lot of labor

in maintaining the track, the power distribution, the signal

system and the rest with rail.

And if you're operating the buses on exclusive right

of way so that they can run rapidly, the productivity of the bus drivers

is increased.

And you also in many of these BRT systems

use articulated buses, long buses.

GLAESER: So you're getting multiple compartments,

multiple chambers for each driver.

This would seem to be an ideal place for driverless vehicles,

as well, on a separated lane so there's less likelihood that anything bad will

happen under complete regulation from the Transit Authority

or whoever runs the buses.

So, I mean, wouldn't this seem to be an area in which you could quite possibly

get rid of the drivers altogether in some future decade?

GOMEZ-IBANEZ: Yes, and for example, places like Singapore,

which has kind of an unskilled labor shortage,

are experimenting now with driverless buses or driver assisted buses.

GLAESER: Of course that makes sense, right?

Singapore being the--

GOMEZ-IBANEZ: Singapore being a pioneer that it is in many things,

including transportation.

GLAESER: That's right.

And we'll get back to that in a second.

The case for rail is surely a function of the density of the environment,

right?

So what kind of density do you need to get rail to make economic sense?

GOMEZ-IBANEZ: It depends very much on the geography.

But I think another myth, a bus myth, right,

is that buses don't have the capacity that are needed for dense corridors

and so you have to build rail.

But there are very few corridors in the United States

that carry more than 15,000 passengers per hour in the peak direction.

GLAESER: That you could surely accommodate with--

GOMEZ-IBANEZ: Oh, our BRT system can do 15,000 easily.

There are some lines--

The Caracas line in Bogota is 40,000 or 45,000 passengers

per peak duration period.

GLAESER: Yeah, I've seen the Caracas line in action.

It's awesome, right?

GOMEZ-IBANEZ: It is awesome.

GLAESER: I mean one of the other advantages of this, particularly

in the development of this just the flexibility of buses relative to rail.

With rail, you're stuck and, you know, you're stuck for a century, right,

as we know that the rail systems in New York and Boston and London

have been straight jacketed in many cases for the city for a very

long period of time.

With buses you can change around.

You can reuse the infrastructure, if the development doesn't occur.

That would seem to be another asset.

GOMEZ-IBANEZ: Well, and you have the disperse trip pattern,

you can have more point to point services

because the vehicle is smaller.

I mean, what people say is a liability, the small vehicle behind one driver,

is also an asset.

You don't have to have an enormous volume of passengers on a route

to justify a route.