The change arrived as a technical notice in the Federal Register and will determine what a dozen American cities build over the next twenty years.
At issue is how the Federal Transit Administration scores projects competing for capital grants. The formula weighs projected ridership, cost, congestion relief and environmental benefit, and small adjustments to it have outsized effects. The revised criteria increase the weight given to cost per rider and reduce the weight given to long-range land use projections.
In plain terms: bus rapid transit scores better. Rail scores worse.
The rationale is defensible. Rail projects have a long record of cost escalation, and several recent lines have opened years late and well over budget. Bus rapid transit can be built faster, adjusted more easily, and delivered for a fraction of the capital cost.
The objection is equally defensible. Ridership on rail lines tends to be substantially higher than on comparable bus service along the same corridor, a gap transit researchers attribute partly to permanence: developers build next to tracks because tracks do not move.
Minneapolis is running the experiment in both directions. The region has invested heavily in arterial bus rapid transit, with lines that have outperformed ridership projections at a fraction of rail's cost. It is also mid-construction on a light rail extension whose price has climbed repeatedly.
Regional transit officials argue the comparison is misleading, because the corridors differ. "We did not build the bus lines instead of rail," one planner said. "We built them where rail was never going to pencil."
The new criteria complicate that argument, because they apply the same test to both. Under the revised scoring, at least two corridors in the region's long-range plan that were programmed for rail would likely be resubmitted as bus projects.
Advocates are divided in ways that cut across the usual alignments. Some environmental groups support the shift, on the grounds that three bus corridors delivered this decade beat one rail line delivered next decade. Some transit riders' unions oppose it, arguing that bus service is easier to cut when budgets tighten, and historically has been.
Both observations are true, which is why the argument is unlikely to end.
Cities with projects already in the pipeline are largely protected; the criteria apply to new entrants. The practical effect will be felt in the plans that have not yet been submitted — the corridors now being drawn on maps in regional planning offices, where the formula is already being read backward to determine what is worth proposing at all.
