Express busways: the ultimate rail replacement service

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/03/express-busways-ultimate-rail-replacement

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The role of the Institute of Economic Affairs is to propose the logical free-market solution to each facet of civilised life, so that by the time the vision passes and the world shimmers back into normal, everyday dystopia, even George Osborne’s face looks mildly reassuring. Certainly, only a brave politician would endorse the thinktank’s latest call to pave over the railways to create express busways – effectively putting millions of voting commuters on a rail replacement bus, for ever.

The IEA claims that the £4bn annual subsidy given to the railway could be better spent elsewhere. According to its calculations, as many people could be shifted via a fleet of coaches as by train, and concreting over train lines would allow cheaper, more flexible travel into major cities. Less space would be needed, letting the state flog off more land to developers, and deregulated buses could zoom into town liberated from the shackles of “harmful government intervention”.

To users of lines like the extremely popular London Overground – whose tracks were once considered ripe for conversion in the 1980s – the destruction of well-functioning rail services might sound counterintuitive. However, to some transport experts, the idea of a busway in itself is sound. Professor Stephen Glaister of the RAC Foundation says: “The idea that it makes sense to use the land for buses rather than railways has a lot going for it. Many studies have shown that capacity is higher, and that’s been demonstrated in practice in Curitiba [Brazil] and Bogotá [Colombia] with designated lanes and cheaper mass transit.” Capacity is largely down to braking: “Rubber tyres on roads have a better braking performance than steel wheels on rail – you can safely run them much closer together.”

Glaister says the reason we don’t have more is partly down to the difficulty of enforcing a busway in an urban area: witness the hostility of many drivers to bus lanes, or indeed most of the rightwing press when Lord Prescott attempted to reserve a lane for buses to Heathrow.

For others, though, it’s a non-starter. Stephen Joseph, of the Campaign for Better Transport, says: “This idea comes around every so often, and every time it’s looked at seriously the numbers never stack up.” Studies of potential conversions since British Rail days have found that initial costings were gross underestimates, he says, while the evidence of guided busways – a tram-style middle ground, which the IEA rejects – has been of ballooning budgets.

The effect of delivering thousands of heavy vehicles into congested city centres may have been underplayed by the IEA, who refer to air pollution as “questionable” and play up “the quieter, constant hum of buses” over trains.

And, as Joseph puts it: “The ambience of travelling on a train is better than on a bus, and that is going to have an effect on patronage.” That should be obvious to a Thatcherite thinktank – the Iron Lady was popularly believed to have dismissed any man over 26 riding a bus as “a failure”.