Human Transit

attention, transit professionals!

Are you currently employed in some aspect of public transit planning, management, policy or operations?  Do you deal with public transit as part of your job, which could be in anything from town planning to social services to journalism?  If so, please click the email button under my photograph at right, if only to tell me who you are.  I'd like to know that you're out there reading.  You're also encouraged to submit comments that way.

Most comments on this blog seem to come from people who are interested in transit as advocates or activists, and their input continues to be encouraged.  I hear less often from professionals who read the blog; I suspect that's because of professional risks associated with stating opinions under your own name.  That's fine, but I'd still like to hear your perspectives, so use email. 

My policy on this:

• Information or comments received via email won't be quoted except in ways that make it anonymous, unless you specify that your name can be used.
• You can state clearly that your remarks are off the record, which means they won't be quoted in any way, anonymous or otherwise.

You're welcome to give further clarifying direction in your email.  For example, if your email is quotable but anonymous, you can specify how you want to be described to get the balance of anonymity and authority that's right for you.  (For example, it's up to you whether you want to be "a New York planning consultant" or "a Brooklyn planning consultant specializing in convention centers" ... You tell me.)

I thought I'd mention this because a recent post named a professional commenter by name.  This was done with his permission, but it might have given the appearance that anyone who writes to me risks being quoted that way, which would be unacceptable to most professionals.  So to be clear: I won't use your name unless you tell me I can, and I won't quote you at all if you want your words to be completely off the record.

Speak up!

it's not a race, but if it were ...

This video, from The Overhead Wire via Great City, is making the rounds. It shows the side-by-side growth of six US rail transit systems, with the apparent goal of humiliating both late-starter Seattle and early-starter-slow-finisher Atlanta.

Note that the grey lines here represent commuter rail, which represents a very small level of investment (and frequency) compared to the colored lines, which are all rail rapid transit.

bus rapid transit stop spacing: is 2 miles too far?

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.

Arterial BRT can't be compared to commuter rail.  It belongs in a space between ordinary limited-stop buses and arterial light rail.  And Swift is clearly at the lower end of that range: it's running on the side lane, for example, where it will trip over turning movements, especially the zillions of driveway accesses into small businesses all along the route.  In such settings, high-reliability exclusive-lane service pretty much has to be in the median, and that's clearly not what this is.

A recent Seattle Transit Blog interview with King County Metro's Karen Rozenzweig here (hat tip: Pantheon) is helpful for defining the kind of service this is.   (Ignore the "Blog has moved" banner and scroll down.)  King County Metro, which serves Seattle itself and southern and eastern suburbs, is looking at a very similar product to Swift, called "Rapid Ride," and she lays out the ideas pretty well.

So about the stop spacing.  Why not stop every 1/2 mile, so everyone's within a 1/4 mile of a stop once they're on the arterial?  The crucial fact of life here is that the distances people will walk vary quite a bit based on the quality of the service.  For a fast, frequent service that will take them long distances, many people will walk over 0.5 mi and some will walk much further. 

So if you put the stops close together, you are helping to make sure you don't miss anyone, but at the same time you're providing duplicate coverage to the people who will walk further.  At the same time, you're reducing the speed of the service and increasing its capital expense -- especially on a system where the stations are really the main fixed-capital item.  Don't be too distracted by acceleration and braking times; they don't make that much difference at this scale compared to the number of stops.

Stop spacing ends up being very political, and varying based on local conditions along the route.  If you're focused on long term urbanist outcomes, and are thinking about how the service will function once there's been some redevelopment, fewer stops may be better, because you'll concentrate development into nodes producing a more transit-efficient development pattern that supports the wide stop spacing into the long term.

Of course this is really bad for the people who are on the highway, a long way from a stop, not able to walk that far, and thus needing to use a local bus.  Good BRT planning looks carefully at densities all along the line, and tries to have this impact only where the ambient density is fairly low, which means there aren't many of those people.  You'll get need-based arguments from the people affected, but planners and politicians have to be trained to distinguish need-based arguments (I'm a nice person, and I really need the service) from demand-based arguments (we're thousands of nice people, and we'll use the service).  BRT is about demand.  Local buses and paratransit are there to serve needs. 

north of seattle: snohomish county's "swift" bus rapid transit

If you think on-street Bus Rapid Transit can never be acceptable, have a look 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.

Swift embodies most of what BRT can be, toward the higher end of the "look and feel" quality spectrum, even without fully exclusive lanes.  There's an intention to add some exclusive lanes in the future.  The political reality, especially in postwar suburbs, is that you often can't win the battle for an exclusive lane until you're already showing some ridership outcomes.  There is some modest signal priority.

Swift runs for about 16 miles mostly along Pacific Highway, which is a classic suburban strip-development boulevard.  The north end of the corridor is Everett, which mostly developed before World War II and thus has the kind of inner city fabric that people love to gentrify.  The south end is Aurora Village on the county line, where you can connect to King County Metro services (also increasingly fast though not at Swift's standard) to get on into Seattle.  (Swift is not the meant to be the main service for travel all the way from Everett to Seattle; Sound Transit express buses do that, supplemented by the very occasional commuter train.)

 Because it's the old highway, Pacific Highway has a lot of relatively old car-oriented development.  Before the parallel Interstate 5 was built, anyone driving between Seattle and Vancouver BC went down this street.  This classic old highway from early in the car era offers quite a bit of redevelopment opportunity, and it will be interesting to see if anything happens around stations in response to the sudden increase in mobility. 

Swift looks like an important step in the ongoing effort to reduce the experiential and practical differences between bus and rail.  It has the usual BRT best-practice facilities such as stations of light-rail quality, sleek articulated buses, etc, but it also does a couple of important things that are not yet common practice in the bus industry, notably:

• Impressively wide station spacing:  Only 12 stations on the 16 mile route, and several of those are clustered in Everett.  On the long suburban part of the line station spacing is as wide as 2 miles.  Obviously parallel local service is still needed, but it means Swift can focus on fast service between the major nodes, including the transfer points. 
• Off-board "proof of payment" fare collection, which reduces dwell by allowing passengers to board and alight all doors.  A few other BRTs do this, such as the Los Angeles Orange Line, but it's been very slow to develop on bus-based services.

The presentation looks good, the choices they've made are understandable given their environment, and I wish them the best.

Graphics: Community Transit

bus rapid transit: notes from a pro

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:

I would note that the "dedicated facility" type of BRT project is relatively rare - not that it should be, but in many cases agencies are trying to enhance bus operations without either the demand, the money, or the planned corridor to create a busway. Even when the opportunity arises as in Brisbane it is common for there to be a segment of on-street operation.

Therefore I wouldn't discount on-street BRT facilities as being "low end" and nearly irrelevant; in fact those are the types of facilities that really need the help, intense planning, and visioning to overcome their inherent flaws and constraints. How to make on-street BRT work as well as off-street lines is the real challenge out there. 

[JW:  Steve's on-street/off-street distinction is almost the same as my distinction between exclusive (e.g. Orange Line) vs. non-exclusive (e.g. Metro Rapid), but not exactly.  It's possible for an on-street BRT to be in an exclusive right-of-way if you can take that much of the street.  But it's certainly challenging for the reasons Steve's discussing.]

In my experience (Brisbane, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Mississauga), off-street busways have been created by a dedicated PT [public transit] team and are fairly straightforward in that respect; you can create BRT design guidelines from scratch and apply them to a new facility. On-street BRT facilities, on the other hand, are typically put together by an uneasy and conflicted group of road / highway engineers who are responsible for the roadway and who don't "get" the transit imperatives, yet are unwilling / unable to hand the corridor over to the transit folks to let them lead the design because they might mess up the (car) traffic operations too much. The streetscaping / urban design folks also seem to get more excited about (and hence interfere with) an on-street project than one in a separate corridor. Since on-street BRT is therefore harder work with a poorer outcome than off-street, no wonder the professional preference is to pursue off-street facilities even when there is greater value to be had in optimizing the utilization of scarce infrastructure through on-street transit measures.

If you wish your BRT were a train, I have no quarrel with that, but please keep in mind that even imperfect, compromised on-street BRT is the result of a lot of diligent work by professionals who are in the business because they really want transit to work.  Like any great process of cultural change, transit must advance on a broad front:  Some people work on the expensive, high-stakes projects like subways, others on surface rail, others on many kinds of improvement that can be done with buses. 

For the reasons Steve describes, the bus planner's work is often the hardest, because he has to work in a territory -- the street -- that car advocates, merchants, and streetscape experts all think they own.  He's often made to feel like an invader when he tries to demand space for transit, just as bike advocates often are.  He has to fight long battles over every signal, every bit of exclusive lane, every parking space, all to piece something together that will make a real difference to a lot of people's mobility.  And it doesn't help that a big chunk of the transit advocacy world just doesn't care about what he's doing.

Even imperfect, compromised bus services like the Metro Rapid in Los Angeles do tremendous good compared to what was there before, and large chunks of the population really appreciate them.  It's inevitable that there are rivalries between rail and bus advocates, who are working on different parts of this broad front of cultural change.  But perhaps we should aspire for a rivalry more like that between the Army and the Navy: spirited competition for prestige and resources, but all in the knowledge that they're fighting the same battle.

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.

Questions, if unanswerable, will make the argument for you.  If answered, they lead to more questions, and the question-and-answer process will help people form clear views better than an angry clash of judgments will do.  Of course, your question may turn out to have a good answer, which may affect your own views.  That's how you know you're having a real conversation. 

Here are some crucial questions that must be asked about any BRT proposal or alternative:

1.  Are we talking about exclusive right of way?

If not, you're at the very low end of what can be called Bus Rapid Transit, the territory of the Los Angeles Metro Rapid, which even at its best is subject to considerable delay due to congestion.  If in this territory, your further questions should be about what if anything will be done to expedite the service.  This kind of service should be attractive to you only if no better alternative is viable that could cover the same number and length of routes.  But it's rarely a reasonable alternative to exclusive right-of-way service such as standard light rail or exclusive BRT, unless demand is simply too low for the latter.

2.  Is it a fully separated busway, like Brisbane's? 

 "Separated" or "grade separated" means that it has no intersections with cross-traffic.  Usually this is possible because it's (a) elevated on structure, (b) operating in a corridor that's already grade separated, often alongside a freeway or railway, or (c) underground.  Brisbane, which has the developed world's best example of a separated busway system, has bits of all three.

If it's fully separated, with passing lanes, it has the potential to deliver the same speed and reliability as rail rapid transit.  It may have lower capacity, but capacity is a complicated issue with several dimensions, and in practice the only capacity question that matters is "Will I be able to get on?"  A competent operations plan will be able to answer that. 

If it's not separated, the next question is: 

"Will it pre-empt intersecting signals to the same extent a light rail project would do, and if not, why not?"

This is a very murky area in my experience.  Sometimes this comes down to the fact that, depending on your jurisdiction, rail invokes a different regulatory authority that imposes different standards.  Rail crossing standards are often derived from the history of heavy rail, freight and passenger, which physically cannot stop on short notice and therefore isn't expected to.  A more coherent argument for signal priority should rely on the need to provide rapid transit, not the abilities of the vehicle or the regulatory authorities that the vehicle technology happens to invoke.  Obviously, real world conversations have to deal with the regulatory regime in place, but it's important to ask enough questions to understand whether the signal priority regime really matches the intent and branding of the service, regardless of the regulatory situation. 

If the answer boils down to impacts on intersecting traffic, insist on an analysis of the options in terms of person-minutes of delay.  Once a surface BRT line is carrying heavy loads, as the Los Angeles Orange Line is, delays to it may be causing more person-minutes of delay than corresponding delays to cross traffic would do.  If the person-minutes calculation is anywhere close to even, you can then look at the stated goals of your local government regarding encouraging public transit use as opposed to car use, and cite them if relevant.

3.  Are there exceptions to the stated degree of exclusivity and separation?  If so, where, and why?

A line is only as reliable as its least reliable point, so if there are localized compromises to the exclusivity or separation of the service, these deserve your intense scrutiny.  On a separated busway aiming to emulate heavy rail's speed and reliability, a single signalized intersection can be a huge limitation.  Brisbane's otherwise magnificent South East busway has one pair of signals at a crucial point right on the edge of downtown, and these cap the capacity of the entire facility.  (Unfortunately, avoiding these signals would have required infrastructure of then-unimaginable size -- a very complex tunnel under the river -- and this would have killed the whole project.)  In Ottawa, the gap in the busway downtown has made it impossible to see the network as a complete rapid transit system.

If you're at-grade but exclusive, in a situation emulating surface light rail, your project may have a few places where exclusivity was too difficult, so the bus mixes with traffic for a few blocks.  There is one situation where this is completely acceptable, and I've proposed it myself:  If a short segment of roadway is too narrow to take a lane from and wildly expensive to widen, you may be able to get the exclusive-lane effect by metering access to that segment with signals.  Short bridges are the obvious example.  Instead of insisting on a bus lane on the bridge itself, provide signals at each end that stop traffic approaching the bridge to let any bus get past it and over the bridge quickly.

There are also times when a BRT can share a segment with very low volumes of car traffic.  This sometimes happens at the ends of busways when you're trying to bring them to an existing terminus such as a shopping center or business district -- an arrangement I've seen in situations as different as Haarlem, Netherlands and the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.  Here the key is to operate on streets that are never congested under normal operations, to have signal priority if possible, and to keep the mix to a minimum.  Check the traffic situation on whatever day peak traffic conditions can be expected, e.g. a Saturday in early December for an American shopping center. 

But this leaves some cases that really are problematic, where BRT mixes with traffic because, well, it would just have too much of a negative impact on other traffic if we took an exclusive lane through that spot.  Obviously here, you need to insist on a quantification of the effect on the BRT with or without that exclusive segment, and the ridership consequences of the greater speed and reliability.  If that's done, an argument can be made one way or the other in terms of person-minutes of delay, including all the downstream impacts due to the loss of reliability at this point.  If transit loses that argument, you then have to assess whether the project is still better than nothing, or better than a competing rail project. 

Finally, even worse, the tradeoff may be between an exclusive lane for BRT and on-street parking, especially in a business district.  Here it's almost impossible to do a quantitative comparison, because the values on the two sides are so different.  I've never seen a strip of small businesses willingly surrender their on-street parking on the basis of any quantitative analysis of anything.  (If you have, please send me a link.)  The instinctive conservatism of small business is completely understandable when you consider their exposure to risk, but these debates are among the most intractable I've ever encountered, and they usually end up as purely political judgments.

Note, by the way, that this whole section applies to specific light rail projects too.  For example, San Francisco's Third Street light rail is mostly exclusive except for a couple of places where it was too hard, and at one of these (the northbound Fourth Street approach to the right onto King Street) the service can get stuck in significant queues behind a signal.   

4.  Is it "open" or "closed"? 

A open BRT is one where some buses branch off of the BRT corridor into various on-street routes, potentially expanding the range of places that can be reached without a connection and also generating a higher frequency on the common BRT segment than pure demand would otherwise justify.  Service in an open BRT can be a (sometimes confusing) mass of overlapping lines, while closed BRT is just a single line or at most a few entirely within the BRT infrastructure. 

Examples of open BRT include Brisbane, Adelaide, Auckland North Shore, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, and in Los Angeles the Harbor and El Monte Transitways.  Here in Sydney the North West T-Way is an open BRT. 

Examples of closed BRT include the Eugene EmX, the Los Angeles Orange Line, and the Boston Silver Line(s).  Here in Sydney, the Liverpool-Parramatta T-Way is currently run as a closed BRT, though there are plans to open it.

The open-closed distinction can be fixed by infrastructure, such as by choosing buses that cannot operate on regular streets or (as in Curitiba) using all high-floor buses with high platforms.  But it can also be operational.  For example, some have proposed operating the Los Angeles Orange Line as open instead of closed.  This would be a major service change but not much of a change of infrastructure.

Closed BRT has its place.  Curitiba is one of its great successes, although that success (in both service and redevelopment) has led to crush loads that are now driving a conversion to rail.  At the opposite end of the demand spectrum, Eugene, Oregon opted for closed BRT with specialized buses and seems happy with that choice. 

But open BRT is most likely to be the project that delivers something a rail project cannot do: direct service to many branches without having to build rail on all the branch lines.  This has been a perfect fit for Brisbane, because that city has a very strong CBD but few other major centers, so the need is for service that can follow the busway some distance from the CBD but then branch out to cover several suburban corridors.  This is the one service pattern for which there is no rail option. 

This may still turn out to be a phase on a longer path to light rail, as it turns out to have been in Ottawa.  Brisbane's busways are designed to be convertible to light rail but there's currently not much interest in doing so.  However, if the busways succeed in galvanizing the creation of some high-density centers further out, the corridors leading to these centers will become the strongest branch of the busway service.  When one branch starts generating capacity needs that exceed what buses can handle, that would be one signal that it's time to look at rail.

More questions?

You bet, but this post is already too long.  Here, to sum up, are a few others that clearly matter.  I'm sure comments will suggest more.

• What about greenhouse gas emissions?  Is there a bus that can match the emissions intensity of an electric rail vehicle?  Note that this may depend on the source of your local electric power.  In San Francisco or points north, you probably run on renewable hydropower, so you're electricity is emissions free (though it may have disfigured some beautiful mountain valleys).  At the opposite extreme, if you're in mainland Australia, your electricity is mostly from burning coal. 
• What about localized emissions?  Emissions from the vehicle will still affect the local streetscape and station environment.  What is the emissions standard of the vehicles proposed? 
• What is the overall level of design and amenity?  BRT that aims to be comparable with rail transit should be comparable on these points. 

And finally, to pick up on a really important theme of recent posts and comments:

• How much money have we saved against the rail option, and how much more service will that buy?  Alternatives analyses are not usually framed this way, of course, but it might sometimes be helpful if they were.  Often what I hear from American activists is that BRT was used to make a project cheaper so that more money could be spent on something other than transit.  One way to meet this suspicion head-on would be to show comparisons of short rail lines and longer BRT lines at the same price.  Obviously, the real cost/value tradeoff will depend on local conditions, and there may even be cases where LRT and BRT cost the same.  But if BRT is cheaper, as it often is, it might get greater acceptance if the money its saving went more directly into building a larger network for the same dollar.

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 American 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 an contrasting stream of intention also built into BRT, well described by commenter Alexander Craghead:

It must be remembered that most US BRT applications mimic light rail because they were sold on the premise of being a budget option for light rail. They were not then, and generally are not now, looked at as being an improvement to the bus system. Many are planned from the start to include the notion of conversion to light rail at a later date, if traffic warrants it.

For a great visual of this, pic up a copy of METRO and check out the bus advertisements. Most of the major ones will be for BRT articulated busses. Note they have streamlined noses, sleek styling, and skirts to hide the tires. These aren't busses, they're busses in light rail drag. The manufacturers themselves are essentially marketing their BRT oriented products as pretend light rail for the budget conscious agency.

This is why many -- myself included -- have an instant visceral reaction to BRT. The immediate words that come to mind are "pretend," "fake," and "mediocre."

Obviously, if what you want is a train, then BRT is a fake, and not a very convincing one.  But if what you want is reliable, attractive, and affordable rapid transit, and you're a bit flexible on ride quality, BRT may be an option.  The vehicle design trend that Alexander notices reflects the belief, by proponents of BRT, that lots of people want reliable, attractive, and affordable rapid transit, and are used to calling that "rail" because rail is the only kind they've ever seen.  If bus designs that look more rail-like help people consider BRT, I don't have a problem with that, especially because buses really are becoming more rail-like in much of the amenity they offer.  At its best, BRT has the effect of separating the idea of "rail" from the idea of "reliable and attractive," so that each citizen can decide whether she's wants to be a rail advocate first or an advocate of a certain quality of service.

As with any new transit concept, if BRT is succeeding, it's because it's capable of being advocated from many points of view, by people who don't all have exactly the same intentions.  So it's important not to reduce any product to the intentions of particular people promoting it.  Yes, BRT can be useful to freeway advocates who just want to spend less on transit and more on freeways, and like BRT because it's cheap.  But they are one of a large spectrum of intentions at work.  We may fear they are co-opting us by selling us transit while they make sure it's inferior.  But we could just as easily co-opt them, by taking advantage of their advocacy even as we intervene to advocate for attention to the basics of good service, things like frequency and reliability as well as the overall level of amenity and comfort.

Anything that gets built is the result of a spectrum of different and even conflicting intentions on the part of different people advocating it.  The fact that a sprawl and freeway advocate supports Project A is never sufficient reason for me to oppose it.  If it is, I've given him way too much power.

"bus rapid transit": getting past the trauma

Since I began seriously reading US transit blogs about a year ago, it's been apparent that many American 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 American activists stretch and broaden their notions of what BRT can mean.

Some of the comments that came back suggested that American activists are just too traumatized by the way "Bus Rapid Transit" has been used in American planning, especially during the Bush administration.  Commenter "Engineer Scotty" claims that in the US, "Bus Rapid Transit is frequently a Trojan Horse proposed by those who would prefer to not fund reasonable public transit at all."  He goes on:

You seem to forget, Jarrett, just how many powerful political forces in the US are opposed to mass transit in ANY form, especially rail transit, and simply want to build freeway after freeway after ... freeway. ... Oil companies, Detroit. Right-wingers who view any public transport as "socialism". Rural voters who view big cities as Sodom and Gomorrah, and who don't want to spend a dime on urban infrastructure projects of any sort. ... State departments of transportation, many of which have HUGE auto-centric cultures. And for the past eight years, the USDOT under Bush.

For these folks, the whole point of pushing BRT instead of LRT is that it can be done on the cheap, effectiveness be damned. That's why BRT systems in the US are all half-assed--these systems are political compromises to begin with. They're not designed to be useful (especially to choice riders), they're designed to be cheap. They're designed to let the hippies and greens and such ride the bus and feel they're Doing Their Part, while Real Americans™ drive to work in their Hummers as usual.

This is the political context in which transit supporters in the US operate.

Another frequent commenter, in an email to me, suggested:

The problem is not the  improvements, it's the idea of "BRT", the idea that transit advocates should stop wanting trains. It's what Lakoff calls a bad frame, like anti-poverty advocates lobbying for aid to welfare queens, or peace activists talking about whether they hate freedom.

The only reason to ever use the term "BRT" is to win over the small subset of transit advocates and government officials who've become convinced that it's the wave of the future. As a buzzword it can open doors. But outside the trendy it's a bad idea.

It's just a word. Try making the exact same arguments without it and you'll get a different reaction.

Wise advise, probably, but I have three discomforts with it:

• While I'm American by birth and training, I'm not in America, nor am I writing exclusively to American readers.  I would like all readers can come to this blog for a relatively global view -- or at least a view that's aware of developed-world practice.  The trauma that American readers report about the term "Bus Rapid Transit" seems to be an American thing, rooted especially in recent experience with Bush administration FTA policy, though there's a longer history of road-dominated thinking behind it.  I know that it's pointless to reason with trauma, and that the people who would use Bus Rapid Transit as a stalking-horse for freeway or anti-transit agendas are still with us.  But I also want to gently remind American readers that the Bush administration is history, and it may be a good time to unclench our fists a bit.
   
• I like words that say what they mean, and "Bus Rapid Transit" says exactly what I mean.  This blog has a specific definition of the word "rapid."  Here it always means "frequent, with widely spaced stops for relatively fast operation."   It is one of several words that I use carefully to try to define clear and meaningful categories of service that do not specify mode, i.e. bus or train.  The authority for my use of the word comes from the common phrase "rapid transit," which usually has this meaning.  Well, sometimes "rapid transit" is provided by buses, and if we can't call this "Bus Rapid Transit," I'm not sure we can talk clearly about it.
   
• Whatever I do, the term Bus Rapid Transit is not going away.  There's a point in many political struggles where you accept that a key word used by your opponent is actually worth fighting to control, rather than just suppressing.  I suspect that the apparent clarity of the term "Bus Rapid Transit" will keep it in the discourse, so we might do better to demand higher standards of BRT rather than trying to change the subject, or even change the word.  We can do that by insisting, whenever it's mentioned, that the speaker clarify what kind of BRT they mean.  Exclusive lane or mixed flow?  Separated or at grade with intersections?  (For that matter, we need to ask such questions when discussing light rail as well, because as we just saw in Los Angeles, it's possible to create a light rail line that's slower than a rapid bus in mixed traffic.)

The real challenge with the term Bus Rapid Transit is that it's a big category, too big really, and we need other words for the different products within it, all of which can be good options in some situations.  As I mentioned in the last post, there are at least three fundamentally different "tiers" of quality that all fall under the term:

• Fully grade-separated busways, with no intersections.
• At-grade exclusive busways with signalized intersections with cross-streets.
• Buses in mixed traffic, with signal priority and wide stop spacing.

For the first of these, perhaps I should surrender to Alan Hoffman's term Quickway, but that feels like a marketing word to me, and while marketing jargon is unavoidable in dealing with the public I'd like to think we can be a little more precise here as people who care about transit, talking together.  So I'm going to continue using the term "busway." 

For the second, I sometimes say "surface BRT" or "at-grade BRT".  Or I'll generally just clarify "exclusive, at-grade" where that's what I mean. 

For the third, well, as I argued here the mixed-flow "Rapid" can be an extremely useful and important product.  It's a bus, its stop spacing is rapid by this blog's definition, and it's transit, so I can't really deny it the name "bus rapid transit."  But I respect the views of those who argue that buses in mixed traffic are so compromised that to call it Bus Rapid Transit is to oversell it and perpetrate a kind of fraud.  Los Angeles County MTA, which operates one of the world's most extensive networks of this product, the Metro Rapid, is careful not brand it in ways that would create confusion with exclusive-lane products.  The industry sometimes uses various forms of "rapid bus," though that's too like "bus rapid transit" to carry us far.

All I know to do is reference the Metro Rapid directly.  I often say something like "mixed-flow rapid bus service, like the Los Angeles Metro Rapid."  But although the Metro Rapid is a bus, and rapid, and transit, I don't usually use the BRT moniker when talking about it.  The best term is yet to be invented, I think.

To sum up, I do respect the fact that the term "Bus Rapid Transit" has some traumatic content, especially for Americans.  I'm open to new words if they'll help us have a clearer conversation.  So keep the comments coming.

minneapolis: unlocking downtown with transit malls

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. 

Now, partly inspired by that example, the City of Minneapolis is about to implement a major change to its downtown street patterns that will much improve the flow for transit across the city.  It comes from my last major consulting project in the US, the Access Minneapolis study.  The client was the City of Minneapolis, and the lead firms were Meyer Mohaddes and Nelson\Nygaard.

In the old arrangement, the major volumes of buses that needed to get through downtown Minneapolis mostly ran in single-lane bus lanes with no passing capability, where every bus was as slow as the slowest bus.  Buses were also spread all over downtown, with a few running on almost every street, creating an arrangement that was illegible for passengers.  The spread-out pattern also meant relatively few buses at any stop, hence relatively few passengers waiting, hence poor shelter from the city's harsh climate and often personal safety concerns. 

After years of study, meetings, and spirited discussions, we recommended a new arrangement.  North-south buses (the largest volume) would mostly be consolidated on just two north-south streets right through the center of downtown -- Marquette Avenue and Second Avenue South.  Each street would have a double-width bus lane in one direction (similar to the Portland transit mall minus light rail) with car traffic in the other direction.  I'm always surprised there aren't more two-lane bus lane arrangements, because although they're a big commitment, they use space really well: A single-width lane with no passing capability starts getting seriously gummed up around 60 buses/hour, but double-width lanes handle 180 buses/hour.  Doubling the width triples the capacity.   It can also dramatically increase speed and reliability.

(Again, this is compared with a single lane with no passing capability, because in Minneapolis the old single bus lanes were contraflow; i.e. the next lane of traffic was in the opposite direction.  Single bus lanes where buses can also pass via the adjacent lane can do somewhat better than 60 buses/hr, depending on how congested the next lane is.)

Double-width lanes generally run best in a skip-stop configuration, in which 2-4 groups of routes serve different stops, in a pattern that repeats every few blocks as you go down the street.  This also makes the service more legible, because each stop represents a particular part of the city or product type.

To get to this outcome, of course, we had to think about whole bands of parallel streets together.  Focusing buses on these two streets meant buses were removed from other streets, allowing them to be specialized around other uses.  We had to consider the accesses to the parking structures.  We had to deal with a range of options for Nicollet Mall, a famous "transit mall" that had become a great pedestrian space but had never worked very well for transit, because it had only one lane in each direction.  Hennepin Avenue, an entertainment and nightlife district, was restored to two-way operation as part of the plan, undoing a one-way couplet that had always strained against the older structure of the city.

For the consultant, planning projects end when we write a final report, send a final invoice, and leave town.  It's hard to describe the pleasure of seeing our work, filtered through the excellent work of many others, finally appearing on the street, where it will unlock potential both for downtown development and also for the whole transit network that depends on it.  If you're in Minneapolis, let me know how it goes!

london: the circle reaches an end

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.

As discussed here, loops touch deep things in the human psyche.  Nobody wants to reach the end of the line, really, except for the transit operator.  In fact, the "end of the line" shows up fairly often as a metaphor for death.  So at many scales, from the London Underground to tiny downtown circulators, there's a constant temptation to offer services that never end, services running in continuous circles.  Few people actually want to travel in circles, but the embracing quality of circles, and perhaps the subtext of forgiveness in the notion that life will eventually bring you back to anything that you missed, keeps causing them to appear, not just in plans but in operations.  Montréal is the latest to propose a giant continuous loop in its subway system.

Why did the Circle Line come apart?  Because it was hard to operate reliably.  Reliability depends on regular breaks that give a late service the opportunity to catch up to its schedule.  Human drivers obviously need breaks too.  Actually, the transit industry usually distinguishes between two kinds of break:

• Layover is the time a human driver needs at the end of a line, to do personal business, meditate, snack, whatever.
• Recovery is spare time in the schedule whose purpose is to enable a late vehicle to get back on time.

Many labor contracts and operations policies have complex formulas governing these two things, but in broad terms, a bus or tram in mixed traffic needs at least 10% of its time to be layover and recovery, and often closer to 15%, while exclusive right-of-way services may need a bit less.

And since nobody wants to be waiting on the vehicle while these breaks occur, efficient transit lines have endpoints where the vehicle will be empty.  Most transit lines that are presented as continuous circles have some provision for this, but it's often awkward.  On the Circle Line, drivers took their breaks by leaving the vehicle and taking over one a few minutes later, a method called "operator fallback," which provided layover but didn't solve the problem of recovery.  Now that they have both, they should see better operations, and perhaps even happier drivers.