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 →
Bus Rapid Transit
Los Angeles: Columnist’s Insight Solves Everything
David Lazarus’s Los Angeles Times column today lays out what everyone who’s studied the problem knows needs to be done.
Since we can’t afford subways everywhere we need them, create “virtual subways,” i.e. exclusive bus lanes on all the major boulevards, by eliminating car lanes. (The Metro Rapid bus network, compromised as it is, was in many ways designed to help people discover this for themselves. When the Rapid was being invented in the 1990s, the LA city council wasn’t willing to consider bus or HOV lanes on arterials. So Metro took the view, “let’s do everything we can to make an attractive fast rail-transit-like bus service, so that more people will care about buses getting through.” That’s pretty much what the Metro Rapid is, and did.)
- Fund transit expansion by hitting up motorists, via gas taxes or congestion pricing.
Confronting Words from U.S. Transit Administrator
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 →
Does Busway Architecture Matter?
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: Moving on from the Busway
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 →
San Diego: The Rail-Bus Balance
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 →
Transit’s Zoom-Whoosh Problem
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 →
Chokepoints as Traffic Meters and Transit Opportunities
My post on the strategic value of chokepoints, using the example of chokepoint-rich Seattle, led to an interesting comment thread at the Seattle Transit Blog. As often happens, discussion quickly turned to my references to rail and Bus Rapid Transit, as readers argued over whether my real agenda was to advance one of those modes.
As regular readers will know, it’s rarely that simple. But chokepoints do point to an advantage for Bus Rapid Transit if you’re trying to do things cheaply. That advantage is that a chokepoint that affects private vehicle traffic is effectively a kind of traffic meter. In our* work for Seattle Dept. of Transportation in the mid 00s, for example, we noticed that congestion was actually worse at the chokepoints around the edges of downtown than right in the center of downtown. The chokepoints were restricting the rate of flow of vehicles so that they couldn’t congest the core, exactly the way a system of freeway ramp meters can limit congestion on a freeway. Continue Reading →
Bus vs Rail, an “Oversimplified Comparison”
Planetizen points out a new paper by Jeffrey R. Brown and Gregory R. Thompson of Florida State University, called “Bus vs. Rail: an Oversimplified Comparison.” From the abstract: Continue Reading →
Include Bus Rapid Transit on Rapid Transit Maps?
Most large transit agencies have a map that shows just their rapid transit services, which are usually rail. One good test of how an agency thinks about bus rapid transit is whether they include it on their rapid transit maps. Los Angeles County MTA’s rapid transit map, here, does include the Orange Line, which is exclusive right of way but is hampered by signal delays. But they don’t show their non-exclusive Metro Rapid product at this scale, which makes sense to me. Continue Reading →