When I last looked at access-based route productivity, I found that a sample of Metro’s conventional bus routes nearly-categorically outperformed a selection of trolleybus routes. The type of vehicle wasn’t the only difference between the two groups, though; they each had a geographic bias. The trolleybus routes all serve Queen Anne Hill; the conventional buses connect downtown Seattle and neighborhoods to its north by way of the Aurora Bridge.
I previously warned about the negative consequences of using mode to judge the effectiveness of transit routes. But the trolleybus routes considered to this point are less valuable than the conventional routes. The reasons for that are, plausibly, due to the infrastructure that underpins them. It would not be wise, though, to rely on an incomplete and skewed result like this to make sweeping conclusions about trolleybuses as a mode. An assortment of King County Metro’s routes run under trolley wire, and there’s nothing about that that condemns them all to ineffectiveness. To demonstrate this, I calculated the same set of access-based route productivity metrics for all of the remaining trolleybus routes.
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