I think that I replied in private rather than posting about the lrt security
issue.
The transit police force is expected to expand by about 1/3 when the trains
start. That means, if I remember correctly, 30 police officers to handle
10 2-car trains, as opposed to about 90 for 900+ buses.
Looking at Tim's posting, while a full lrt train might carry 250 riders,
the ratio above means that each train could have a police officer at all
times, while each bus could have an officer about 1/30 of the time, if all
officers were riding at all times. Those figures are based on round-the-clock
operations with all officers riding instead of doing other things, so maybe
the bus figure (given shorter hours and fewer buses operating off-hours)
could be about 1/10 of the time. To me and to a bus driver, the trains will
have more than 10 times the protection of transit police.
Passenger miles aren't a good measure for security. Vehicle miles might be.
Remember that rush hour figures predict 2,500 trips per peak hour in the peak
direction. So if you use 2.5 hours of rush am and pm, that means that about
15,000 of the daily trips will be to/from downtown during rush hour and the
other 10,000 predicted for 2020 will take place during the other 15 hours of
operation, or no more than 670 per hour in both directions combined. Dividing
that by 4-6 trains per hour in each direction, might make you believe that
each non-rush train would be carrying 50-85 riders. You'll look hard to find
that when you stand by the tracks. It's actually fewer when you factor in
reverse commute traffic during rush hour. Of course the starting year
figures are about 3/4 of these figures.
Bruce Gaarder
Highland Park Saint Paul
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tim Bonham wrote:
> It seems obvious to me that the bus drivers & riders will come out much
> better than LRT in this. After all, you will have 1 LRT driver for several
> hundred passengers, vs. about 2 or 3 dozen passengers / driver on the bus
> system. So based just on these numbers, the bus system is likely to be
> spending much more per passenger mile on security.
