Although I’ve done some Bus Rapid Transit planning, my Canadian colleague, Steve Schijns, has been doing it for decades, including important work in both Ottawa and Brisbane. He’s also up to date on a lot of the BRT happening around Toronto. In response to my previous post, he sent along these thoughts, which I thought I’d share verbatim: Continue Reading →
Author Archive | Jarrett
Bus Rapid Transit: Some Questions to Ask
There’s been lively comment on the last several posts about Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), including its recent history in America and elsewhere, the usefulness of the term, and the suspicions that it raises.
Still, “Bus Rapid Transit” is not going away. So as you consider new BRT proposals that arise in your community, possibly as alternatives to a rail project that you’d prefer, here’s a wise bit of advice I was once given about conversing with people who have differing viewpoints and incomplete information:
Don’t state a judgment. Ask a question. Continue Reading →
Bus Rapid Transit and the Law of Multiple Intentions
In recent posts on Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) I’ve been dealing with the widespread feeling among US transit advocates that BRT proposals are designed to serve the interests of people who want transit to be cheap to build and don’t care whether it works. But of course, there’s a contrasting stream of intention also built into BRT, well described by commenter Alexander Craghead: Continue Reading →
“Bus Rapid Transit”: Getting Past the Trauma
Since I began seriously reading US transit blogs about a year ago, it’s been apparent that many US activists have a problem with the term “Bus Rapid Transit.” My goal in my recent post on the Brisbane busway system was to illustrate a dramatically different vision of BRT from what Americans are used to, and thus to help US activists stretch and broaden their notions of what BRT can mean. Continue Reading →
Minneapolis: Unlocking Downtown with Transit Malls
Are the streets of your downtown all too similar to each other, all full of lots of cars and maybe a few trucks and buses? Do the differences between parallel streets, in commercial character and pedestrian life, seem feeble compared to the mass of identical traffic lanes that dominate the visual impression? Often, the most efficient downtown network designs, and the best urban design outcomes, result from making parallel streets more different from each other, more specialized around different functions. Streetcars (trams) used to drive such specialization, and sometimes still do, but elsewhere cities need to find their way back to that logic, with or without streetcars. One of the first big American successes in this direction was the Portland transit mall, which opened in 1977. There, two of the most central streets in downtown were given over primarily to transit, while parallel streets one block over were devoted mainly to cars. Continue Reading →
London: the Circle Reaches an End
One of the world’s most famous continuous loops is finally reaching an endpoint. The London Underground’s Circle Line, which has long attracted tourists with its simplicity but bedeviled its operators with lack of rest, is to be broken apart into a “tadpole” shape, with trains leaving the circle at Paddington, via a spur of the current Hammersmith & City Line, to end at Hammersmith. Continue Reading →
Bus-Rail Debates in a Beautiful Abstract City, and in Los Angeles
On a recent post, commenter Pantheon laid out the core idea that explains why I cannot be a full-time rail booster, even though I love riding trains as much as anyone:
The problem can be posed in the abstract in the following way. Let’s
say we have a city with 20 neighbourhoods, A-T. Our city has a big
deficit in transit infrastructure, and limited resources for redressing
it. We have X dollars to build infrastructure, which is enough to do
one of the following things:
Continue Reading →
Bus Rapid Transit Followup
I’ll pull together a response to feedback on the controversial Brisbane busway post in the next few days, but meanwhile, Engineer Scotty asks a good clarifying question:
Part of the problem with BRT [Bus Rapid Transit] acceptance in the US, is [that] most visible BRT systems … tend to look and act like rail-based metros. In the US, we speak of BRT lines–the Silver Line in Boston, the Orange Line in LA, EmX in Eugene, OR–and so forth. The busses which run on BRT are different than the local busses (different branding, different route nomenclature, different fare structures, rapid boarding, longer station spacing, nicer stations, proof-of-payment or turnstiles rather than pay-the-driver-as-you-board)–
Continue Reading →
Los Angeles: Reader Feedback on the Gold Line
My attempt at a feel-good post on the opening of the East Los Angeles Gold Line light rail extension attracted a lot of comment from locals who don’t feel so good about it. Continue Reading →
Brisbane: Bus Rapid Transit Soars
If you’ve never been to Brisbane, Australia, you’ve probably never seen Bus Rapid Transit done at the highest standard of quality in a developed country. Only Ottawa comes close.
In the US, in particular, a generation of activists has been taught that Bus Rapid Transit means inferior rapid transit, because there’s no will to insist on design choices that protect buses from delay as completely as trains are usually protected. Continue Reading →