Comparison of Emissions from Light Rail Transit and Bus Rapid Transit

Bus rapid transit (BRT) is an evolving and promising transit mode that has emerged as a low-cost competitor to light rail transit (LRT) in providing medium-capacity semirapid transit. In addition, recent advances in diesel and compressed natural gas technology have caused the truism “electric rail is cleaner than diesel bus” to be revisited. A partial fuel cycle comparison of the regional or urban emissions of carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen, and volatile organic compounds from BRT and LRT is presented. The BRT analysis includes tailpipe exhaust emissions and fuel transportation, storage, and distribution emissions. The LRT analysis contains electric power plant emissions and line-loss-induced emissions. The analysis shows that whenever equal levels of technology are compared, LRT consistently performs better than BRT despite recent advances in the BRT mode. The analysis also shows that both modes are cleaner now than in the past

Defining a Primary Market and Estimating Demand for Major Bicycle-Sharing Program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Public bicycle-sharing (bike share) programs have become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly in Europe, with a number of cities recently implementing systems and high levels of usage. North American efforts have been more limited to date, with high-profile recent examples including a small program in Washington, D.C., and a substantial seasonal program in Montreal, Canada. Because there are no established large-scale programs in the United States, planners exploring potential system designs and feasibilities are faced with an unusual degree of uncertainty about who would ride, where they might ride, and how often they might ride. A large-scale bike share system is under consideration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This paper discusses the methods and findings of a two-phase project that (a) used a raster-based geographic information system analysis to identify a primary geographic market area for a bike share program and (b) applied bike share trip diversion rates observed in peer European cities to estimate daily bike share trips in the primary market area. This analysis resulted in estimates for daily usage in Philadelphia that ranged from roughly 6,000 to 23,000 for two scales of market area and three demand scenarios (low, middle, and high). As bike share systems continue to proliferate in different settings, new data can refine the methods used here to provide increasing levels of certainty in the future