Author Archive | Jarrett

Bus Rapid Transit Stop Spacing: Is 2 Miles Too Far?

Posted on November 29, 2009 in General

Joseph E asks an excellent question in response to my last post about the new Swift BRT, in Snohomish County north of Seattle. Here’s the heart of it:

Jarrett,
do you feel the wide stop spacing is a benefit? I was inclined to think the stations are too far apart. In comparison, commuter rail stops every 1 to 3 miles in most places (well, on the East and West coast), but always has an exclusive right-of-way, crossing gates, and high-speed operation between stations.
BRT should be capable of accelerating faster than diesel commuter trains, and obviously can stop much faster than even light rail. So why not have stations every 1/2 to 1 mile? It is much easier to walk 5 or 10 minutes to a station than walk to a local bus stop and transfer a mile down the road.

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North of Seattle: Snohomish County’s “Swift” Bus Rapid Transit

Posted on November 29, 2009 in Bus Rapid Transit, Seattle

If you think on-street Bus Rapid Transit can never be acceptable, have a look at the new “Swift” project in Snohomish County, the suburban area north of Seattle. The local agency, Community Transit, has a slick but very informative presentation, including a great video, here. People who think BRT can never be good transit really need to watch the video. It’s definitely a sales pitch, but it gives a good overview of the system and shows some of why BRT projects have such appeal, especially in outer-suburban areas where densities don’t support rail, at least not yet. Continue Reading →

Bus Rapid Transit: Notes from a Pro

Posted on November 29, 2009 in General

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 →

Bus Rapid Transit: Some Questions to Ask

Posted on November 26, 2009 in Branding, Bus Rapid Transit, Philosophy

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

Posted on November 24, 2009 in Branding, Bus Rapid Transit, Language

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

Posted on November 24, 2009 in General

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

Posted on November 23, 2009 in Downtowns, Legibility, Minneapolis – St. Paul, Portland

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

Posted on November 22, 2009 in London, Loops, Rail Transit

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

Posted on November 20, 2009 in Bus Rapid Transit, Los Angeles, Rail Transit

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:
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Bus Rapid Transit Followup

Posted on November 19, 2009 in Brisbane, Bus Rapid Transit, Language, Los Angeles, Ottawa

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)–
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