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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

550px-Circle_Line.svgOne 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:
Continue Reading →

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)–
Continue Reading →

Brisbane: Bus Rapid Transit Soars

Posted on November 16, 2009 in Brisbane, Bus Rapid Transit, Ottawa

BrisbaneBRT1  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 →

Los Angeles: Gold Line Opens; “Planners” Blamed

Posted on November 14, 2009 in Los Angeles, Rail Transit

Metro-gold-line-map Congratulations to Los Angeles on today’s opening of the Gold Line light rail extension, which runs from Union Station through several historically neglected suburbs to East Los Angeles, and will probably someday go further.

More precisely, congratulations to every Angeleno except Ari B.Bloomekatz of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote this:

Why is the Gold Line not a subway?

From the beginning, residents and politicians on the Eastside pushed for the Gold Line extension to be built completely underground. In the end, transportation planners decided to make a roughly 1.7-mile portion of the Gold Line a subway — the part that runs underneath Boyle Heights. The majority of the route runs above ground.

Continue Reading →

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