Rail doesn’t get potholes. As for obstacles, streetcars can just push motor vehicles out of the way.

Buses are fine on relatively low usage lines. Once a line sees regular, medium or heavy usage it should seriously be considered for conversion to rail. Despite what the article says, rail does offer long term operation cost savings. It’s also a higher quality transportation option than buses. Don’t underestimate the effect of this. People who would never dream of riding a bus will often happily ride light rail. Buses are a tool which has a use, but they’re not the be all and end all of public transit despite what the bustitution folks like to think. Rail offers scalability buses just can’t.

I’m guessing it wasn’t even remotely practical myself. Really, the primary and only advantage would be you can lay tracks right on the river bed, avoiding the need for a tunnel, but other than that there are all the downsides you mention. I also question how well exposed tracks at the bottom of the river would hold up. They would likely become full of sediment in short order.

Of course, it all could have been a radio announcer playing games but he did sound serious. I was 16 at the time, so I took the announcement at face value. Now I would be quite skeptical.

That said, given the propensity of some areas of the city to flood, designing trains which can run if there’s a foot or two of water on the tracks might make a bit of sense. Obviously you wouldn’t want to do this for an extended period, but it might let you restore limited service shortly after a major event hits.

If the sea levels were a lot lower, wouldn’t that have benefited all low-lying areas, and not just lower Manhattan?

I’m not sure exactly which areas you’re referring to. I do know that in the 1800s, when Brooklyn started to really transition from a sleepy town to a real city, the initial focus of the city was almost exclusively around the waterfront. This is for a whole bunch of reasons, but most significantly because the ferry terminals that were lifelines to Manhattan were all at the waterfront’s end. And much of the waterfront had important industrial uses, with much housing built nearby to accommodate.

As a result, the area around Fulton Ferry, the end of Atlantic Ave by the piers, etc. were epicenters of activity, commerce, and development. And South Brooklyn (now Cobble Hill / Columbia Waterfront / Red Hook) became a major industrial hub (with housing all around).

It was only when the Brooklyn Bridge opened that development moved inland. Not, to my knowledge, because of flooding concerns (the piers were still important economic centers), but simply because there was more open space. The pier side areas were already full.

That’s the case for South Brooklyn, at least. The waterfront has a long and important history, including being a (the?) major center of development and economic activity. I know very little about the history of flooding but am not aware of any evidence that flooding concerns historically discouraged development. There very well may be such evidence and I’d be interested to learn about it.

There are zero legal issues to pushing motor vehicles out of the way if they park on light rail tracks. There’s already precedent for this. What happens when a motor vehicle intrudes on railroad tracks when a train is coming? It gets pushed out of the way, and the owner has zero legal recourse because he/she was trespassing. Same thing here. The fact a bus can go around an obstruction probably means a car owner can sue if the bus driver opts instead to just push the motor vehicle out of the bus lane. A street car can’t go around a motor vehicle parked in front of it. The only option is to push it out of the way. The law supports them doing so because the motor vehicle operator is trespassing.

Well, it was already clear you are not an attorney, so let’s skip right to the second paragraph.
“. This route is probably a bad route even for buses, but I’m not seeing streetcar lines proposed anywhere else.”
So, you just want street cars.
Strangely enough, we used to have street cars, we started phasing them out almost 100 years ago.
Are there benefits to street cars, of course, do they outweigh the negative, perhaps. Do they justify the cost, no way!
Paying for themselves is complete nonsense. 2 1/2 BILLION DOLLARS!!
I bet you could do it my way for a tenth of that.
“We have to start somewhere.” I assume you mean the Green aspect.
Spend money on solar panels on City buildings and further encourage buildings with large roofs to do so—Underwater turbines in the rivers– expand the compost program and use it to generate power. They could at least pay for themselves (eventually) while taking pressure off the grid.

Either it was April 1 or you misheard. The concept is quite obviously absurd, for many reasons.

To categorically say x mode costs more without any qualification is either abjectly ignorant or deliberately dishonest. The value capture scheme may or may not be efficacious, but even accepting some fairly modest assumptions about inflation and ridership probably means the project couldn’t possibly cost that much more per rider than an equivalent bus route over a half century or so.

And I would point out, for design reasons, an equivalent bus route probably isn’t feasible. So it’s basically a choice between doing it with streetcars/LRVs or just not doing it. The latter is a legitimate preference.

Because rail != bus and they interact rather differently with their environments?

You probably misunderstood what I said though. It’s not that a parallel bus route isn’t feasible; that’s trivially easy, though likely unreliable at such a length. It’s that an equivalent route performing the same function isn’t feasible with buses. What they’re trying to do is encourage some longer distance trips that are probably ill-suited to slower traditional city buses. Given the twists and turns of the route, it doesn’t seem exactly BRT-friendly either (unlike, say, similarly lengthy but very wide/straight Woodhaven).

That’s just not true. Losing a fixed guideway is an enormous penalty for a long vehicle that turns a lot. Even changing lanes is immensely inconvenient for buses and best avoided. Whatever they got wrong, Schwartz and others who worked on this proposal probably were capable of figuring that out. I don’t know if I believe the average speed you cite for the streetcar would be that high anyway, but note that, if it is true, it is nearly double the average speed of the M15 – but also suspiciously significantly faster than urban HBLR segments.

Not only you, but the cost/finance thing is never, ever adequately defended or explained. When you claim that alt A costs more than alt B, there should at least be some degree of recognition for the costs of the entire scope of the project. Just saying something costs more because you’re reacting to a 10 figure number is meaningless.

I don’t think that could happen.

“But we know ridership and income from new development will both be greater than zero.”

as it would with buses.

Perhaps, but then nobody is exaggerating their shortcomings either.

🙁