From Alon Levy on my post re: New York’s Bus Rapid Transit product, the Select Bus Service (SBS), which references this story in New York Magazine.
I’m going to say here what I said on the Urbanophile: it’s an uncritical fluff piece. The reality of SBS is that it’s a substandard product by European standards. The smoking gun is that during fare inspections on SBS, the bus has to stand still. The inspectors drive in and have to drive back, so the bus has to stay in one place until they get out.
If we put railroad tracks down on space where a bus lane is and asked anyone would you ever stop your car on the railroad tracks, the answer would be no. The idea that 30 tons of steel is going to come down the street is enough of a deterrent. … We all have an explanation about why entering a bus lane is a little thing and it’s okay. And the fact is that it’s not okay—the fact is that 75 to 100 people on a bus are held up over that.
— MTA Chief Executive Jay Walder
… as quoted in a must-read New York Magazine article on the success of New York City’s Select Bus Service.
The new “rapid bus” network proposed for Barcelona looks a lot like the Los Angeles Metro Rapid: No exclusive lanes, but strong signal priority, emphasis on fast implementation, and judging from the map, very wide stops. I would resist calling this Bus Rapid Transit, though, unless you want the term to mean “any and all corridor-wide attempts to make buses a little faster.” Continue Reading →
An excellent article by Meena Kadri at the Design Observer Group offers a tour of the new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system in Ahmedabad, India. While North Americans argue about whether Bus Rapid Transit can substitute for rail, the developing world is building a lot of both. India, though, made an early commitment to BRT for its second-tier cities and corridors. Continue Reading →
David Lazarus’s Los Angeles Times column today lays out what everyone who’s studied the problem knows needs to be done.
As usual, the Transport Politic has a good survey of the confronting speech by US Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff. People who are in this business because they love trains will find it especially disturbing. Read the whole thing.
Rogoff’s gist is: We need to slow down on constructing new rail transit, so that we can focus more on our massive deficits in operations and maintenance.
As someone who values abundant access, and who views technologies as tools rather than goals, I obviously have some sympathy with this view, though I prefer to be a little more nuanced than Rogoff is: Continue Reading →
As I suggested in the last post, the decision to replace the Ottawa busway with light rail may well make sense, but that it should not be an occasion for anti-busway triumphalism, as the busway was never complete; the crucial downtown segment was always missing.
But I also think that design and architecture matter, and I wonder if some aspects of the original busway’s design made it hard for people to appreciate.
When I toured the busway in 2006, I have to say I felt overwhelmed, and sometimes a little oppressed, by the design choices. First of all, the whole thing is very, very, very red.
Continue Reading →
Ottawa is moving forward with a plan to replace its partial busway network with light rail, including a new tunnel under downtown. As usual, The Transport Politic provides a well-linked overview of the issue. So this is probably my last relevant chance to talk about my tour and observations of the busway in 2006. I took a particular interest in this busway because it is the conceptual ancestor of the busway network now being built in Brisbane, and the basis for the “Quickways” concept advocated in the US by Alan Hoffman. Continue Reading →
The Transport Politic has a good overview of the recently announced rapid transit plans for San Diego. The plan, in short, is to add only one more line to the region’s light rail system, a long northward extension to the huge University of California San Diego (UCSD) campus. For other corridors in the region, the focus is Bus Rapid Transit. Continue Reading →
My friend Dale, a Portland poet and essayist, recently shifted his commute to downtown from car-and-sometimes-bus to usually-bicycle. He’s posted “ten things I’ve learned after six months of riding a bicycle” (here, preceded by three interesting paragraphs on Jefferson and Adams). My favorite of the ten:
9) It’s just as fun as when you were a kid. You go zoom! and whoosh!
You’re a sky creature, not a miserable earth-crawler. And you get to
the end of your commute feeling invigorated and intensely alive.
And I thought: Yes, transit has a zoom-whoosh problem. Nobody today will describe the riders of the 14-Hawthorne bus (Dale’s other option) as “sky creatures.” Indeed the 20th century bus operations model — lots of stops, one-by-one fare transactions, getting stuck in turnouts or behind parallel-parking cars — is the closest thing to “earth-crawling” that modern technology can offer at scale. Continue Reading →