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
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-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 →
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 →
The March of the Centipedes: Amsterdam’s Bus Rapid Transit Line
Throughout the Thredbo conference on transit competition in Delft, Netherlands last week, the various Dutch speakers and hosts managed to keep up a continuous theme of national self-reproach. The message was something like: “We know everyone thinks we’re the closest thing to an urban transport paradise on earth, so the best service we can offer is to show you all the ways that even we can screw up.” The conference began with a plenary presentation by Hugo Priemus of the Delft University of Technology on collusion and price-fixing in the Dutch construction industry, and wrapped up with a study tour that included the Zuidtangent Bus Rapid Transit system, giving particular emphasis to its most embarrassing feature.
Will a Busway Give Me Direct Service to Downtown?
In my post on Brisbane’s King George Square busway station, I emphasized that the service pattern was of few routes running at high frequencies. Michael Setty commented
What is
really happening in Brisbane contradicts the marketing pitch made for
so-called “Quickways” (grade-separated busways) by
www.movesandiego.org, which emphasizes so-called “world best practices”
focusing on the ability of buses to operate directly from origin to
destination …
Brisbane: A Tour of the South East Busway
A basic duty of transit consultants like me is to show each city what other cities are doing, and help cities figure out which of those models are right for them. For example, most people have never seen Bus Rapid Transit done in a way that provides the complete “rapid-transit” experience that we expect from urban rail transit, with complete separation from traffic. So I thought I’d offer a tour of Brisbane’s South East Busway, which does exactly that.
When assessing your options for a particular transit market, it’s important to realize that many of the features that attract us to rail rapid transit can be provided in a busway setting, including an attention to design that’s too often absent from bus transit facilities.
The Environmental Defense Fund Invites Us to Stop Waiting
It’s hard to pick much of a quarrel with the Environmental Defense Fund’s new report Reinventing Transit, which invites us to admire 11 US “case studies” where a major mobility improvement has been achieved fast and affordably. The cases are:
- Rural transit services in the San Joaquin Valley (Kings County, CA)
- The Orange Line Bus Rapid Transit corridor in Los Angeles
- The Portland Streetcar
- Flexible suburban bus routes in Prince William County, MD
- Bus-only shoulder lanes on the freeways of Minneapolis, MN
- Bus Rapid Transit in Eugene, OR (as an example of a small-city application)
- Community shuttles to commuter rail in New Jersey
- Community-tailored transit options in Grand Rapids, MI
- Downtown Bus Rapid Transit in Orlando, FL
- Bike Transit Centers in several cities nationwide
- New York City’s “Select Bus Service”, a form of partial Bus Rapid Transit
We could disagree whether these are really the “top 11,” but that’s part of the point, just as it is in those lists of “top livable cities.” By quarreling with the list we engage in the kind of thinking that the authors want to encourage. In this case, the goal is to inspire the general reader with the range of innovation occurring in the US transit industry. As the authors state: