Human Transit

boston: the "rapid transit and key bus routes" map

As several commenters have mentioned lately, Boston's transit agency recently published a new network overview map, part of an overhaul of the information system.   The new map is similar in function to a subway network map but with some key bus lines added.  Here's a slice, but you can get the whole thing, in much better resolution, here.

Most large transit agencies with extensive rail transit publish a map of just the rail transit services.  These tend to be the fastest, most frequent, and highest-capacity services in the network, so it makes sense that if you zoom out to a full-system overview, these are what you should see. 

But when you look at the map asking a specific question -- "so how would I get from A to B? -- a standard rail transit map may not give you the answer, especially if you're outside the core.  Most mature rail transit networks have a core area where many lines cross, forming a lattice of lines that can be used to get from almost any station to any other.  Think London inside the Circle Line loop, or Lower Manhattan, or most of the city of Paris.  But further out, the rail transit map presents single lines radiating outward from the city.  To travel between two outer stations on different lines, the subway may not be the fastest route, because it will require you to go into the urban core and back.

In a smaller network like Boston's, there's only a small area downtown where many subway lines interconnect.  Most of the network is formed by radial lines extending outward from downtown.  So many, many trips between rail stations are not logically routed via the rail network.   If you want to go, for example, from Harvard on the Red Line to Harvard Avenue station on the Green Line, you don't want the Red Line or the Green Line, you want bus line 66.  And while the 66 isn't as frequent as a subway (its midday frequency is 16 minutes, which usually means it used to be 15) it's still going to get you there sooner than taking the subway into downtown Boston and back out.

I don't know the intentions behind the selection of "key bus routes," but that's the best sense I can make of it.  And as such, it makes good sense.  As always, I would prefer to see a Frequent Network map, where the appearance of a line guaranteed high frequency, but such a map would probably be much more crowded in the core of Boston, and less suited to getting a zoomed-out picture of the whole network.

(And yes, the map's representation of the Silver Line, in the southeast part of this slice, makes me a little seasick.  It seems to be saying that the Silver Line - Green Line connection, at Boylston, works in only one direction.  In fact, the Silver Line [a Bus Rapid Transit service] is really four lines, and the apparent figure-eight is two of them overlapping.  But there's no way I'd know that from this map.)  

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.

Here's what a bit of the Brisbane's regional rail map looks like.  Note the busway is shown, extending north and southeast from downtown. 

Note that they have shown only the exclusive portion of the busway, the segments where buses are coming every few minutes and have an exclusive, separated roadway that protects them from almost all delay.  I would argue strongly that by any service-based or mobility-based definition of rapid transit, that service has to be included.  In fact, it's much more reliable than light rail on the surface with intersections.  In its speed, frequency, reliability, and station amenity, it does exactly what any rail rapid transit system does.  You can decide that you won't use it because you don't like the ride quality, but a lot of people just want to know where they can get to via rapid transit, and this map is trying to be the answer.

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.

paris rapid transit: the four levels of nomenclature

A continuation of this post.

The core branding idea of the Paris RER is a really powerful one.  Here's how it used to be presented, as a consistent citywide product (click to enlarge; full-size map here):

paris: do we have enough logos yet?

A lot has improved about transit in Paris since I was last there in 1991, and certainly since I lived there in 1986.  But I'm having trouble finding any positive angle on the partial re-branding of the crucial commuter rail and long-distance metro service, the RER.  Because Paris does everything on such an operatic scale, the new RER brands may offer a useful parable about the perils of agency-centered communications, especially in an era where European public transit operating companies are expected to act like private businesses.

First, the product.  The rapid transit network in Paris has long been formed out of two elements, which have had separate brands for a good reason: they offer substantially different types of mobility.

• The Métro is the standard subway system suitable for in-city travel, with very high frequencies and closely spaced stations -- generally more than one per kilometre.  Métro lines are simple and consistent: all lines make all stops, and there are very few branches, shortlines, and other footnote-worthy pitfalls to ensnare the customer.  Métro lines are identifed by numbers, currently 1-14.
• The RER (Réseau Express Regional or "regional express network") consists of electrified commuter rail lines -- no different in technology from many intercity services -- which come together into corridors that cross the city in special subways.  The core segments crossing the city are a bit less frequent than métro but much faster, as they make far fewer stops, a spacing more in the range of 2-4 km.  So if you're going all the way across the city, the RER can be faster for you.  RER lines have always been known by letters, currently A-E.

welcoming guests to your city: a reader's checklist

 
On my post on failed welcoming, commenter Pantheon suggested an excellent checklist for transit agencies who want to care about newcomers to their city:

berlin, seen through a bus-wrap

Many transit agencies depend on advertising revenue from wraps,  those advertisements that cover the windows of the bus as well as the rest of the side.  Berlin has them on some of its double-deckers.

vienna: even perfect integration isn't perfect

As part of my Europe tour, I thought I'd give some attention to things that even the best European systems have trouble getting right.  

frequent network maps: an obvious idea that took forever to happen

If you know San Francisco at all, take a look at Steve Boland's new map of its high-frequency "main lines."   It's quite deservedly copyrighted, so I've shown just a taste of it here.

For years I've advocated that transit agencies need to produce clear maps of their high-frequency networks, so that people can quickly see where they can go without waiting long.  I also argue that these maps should be on the wall of every planner, everyone making decisions about social services, indeed everyone who decides where to locate anything.  Because ultimately, the most effective public transit is what happens when the city grows in response to the transit network -- just as all cities did until about 1945.