Human Transit

brisbane: a frequent network map

In the post on including Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) on rapid transit maps, I showed a bit of Brisbane's rapid transit map, which includes the busway but not its branches, since the branches aren't rapid.

(Actually, to be quite fair, it's really a rail + rapid transit map, as it includes rail lines that do not rise to 15-minute frequencies all day.)

To complement that map, here's Brent Palmer's latest draft of a frequent network map for Brisbane.  For a fully legible version, see his blog here.  (Click on the small map there for the big one, then click again to zoom in so you can read it.  Despite the photo of Seattle on his banner, his blog seems pretty dedicated to Brisbane.)

This should give you a sense of both the extent of Brisbane's frequent network and the way the network functions through the busway.  The busway is the band of routes extending southeast to Eight Mile Plains and north to "RBWH" (Royal Brisbane Women's Hospital). 

In the lower left of the map, the bridge across the river into the University of Queensland ("UQ Lakes") is Brisbane's first green bridge, a bridge for transit, bicycles, and pedestrians only.  The most distinctive feature of Brisbane's inner city geography is the winding river with the remarkable shortage of bridges.  This bridge allows transit to serve a trip that would be much, much more circuitous for a motorist, as there are no other car-capable bridges anywhere nearby.

Graphic: Brent Palmer

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 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)--

Everything about the service is made to look like a rail-based metro service, except for the tires. I think that therein lies the problem--trains are better than busses at being trains, and this sort of distinct corridor service tends to be better served by rail, all else being equal.

There are exceptions, of course--low volume small-city lines like EmX again--but such services ignore the fundamental strength of busses, which is that they aren't tied to the physical infrastructure. Other than the capital cost--something which it is usually not wise to optimize for, as governments can generally get capital funding more easily than operating revenue--if you limit the BRT vehicles to the BRT infrastructure, you're generally getting something that costs more and not less to operate. BRT, to be most useful, needs to be disconnected from the notion of "lines", where the line refers to the physical infrastructure. Would you agree with this, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Scotty is onto an important distinction.  In the BRT business, the systems Scotty cites (Eugene, Los Angeles Orange Line, Boston Silver Line) are called 'closed' systems, in that all buses operate only within the specified infrastructure, with a separate brand.  Each is just one route or in a few cases, like the Silver Line, there may be two or three patterns. 

Brisbane is an 'open' system, like Ottawa and Pittsburgh, and like the El Monte Transitway in Los Angeles.  The busway infrastructure is branded, and there are bus routes that remain entirely within it, but there are many others that branch off of it into the regular street network.  The Busway brand applies to the infrastructure, not the routes.  The buses running in the busway are ordinary Brisbane Transport buses like you'd see on any route in the city.  

However, the distinction between open and closed is not the same as the distinction between "emulating light rail" and "emulating heavy rail."  That distinction is about grade separation, i.e. separation from cross traffic.  Typical recent American applications such as the Los Angeles Orange Line or Eugene's EmX are emulating light rail in their ability to run onstreet and cross streets at signals, which heavy rail generally doesn't do.  As I've said, I think Brisbane's busway segment is a fairer imitation of heavy-rail speed and reliability than anything in North America, apart from fragmentary busways in Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles etc.  Of those, only Ottawa's is anything close to a complete system, and it's compromised, of course, by the lack of a downtown segment.

The two distinctions are quite separate.  Here in Sydney, for example, there are two busways (Liverpool Parramatta T-way and North West T-way) that are entirely at grade with lots of signalised intersections.  The first is currently 'closed' -- operated by a single line running the whole length -- but there are plans to make it 'open.'  The second has always been open, i.e. served by a range of routes that branch off of it at various points. 

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. 

When I talk about Bus Rapid Transit with American transit advocates, they visualize, at best, something like the Los Angeles Orange Line, which is Bus Rapid Transit except that (a) it mixes with traffic near its endpoints and (b) the signalized intersections every mile or so along the route don't give adequate priority to the buses, causing significant delay.  Europe's limited adventures in BRT tend to include similar compromises.

A simple way to think about American BRT is that so far, it has only attempted to imitate light rail, which also can suffer from the same compromises around exclusive lanes and signals (though in practice it usually isn't compromised as much as BRT is).  Brisbane, by contrast, is trying to imitate heavy rail or "metro" styles of rapid transit. 

Brisbane's busway network consists of bus roadways that are not just exclusive (not shared with other vehicles) but also largely separated (not intersecting the path of other vehicles).  The original South East Busway (toured in this post) ran mostly in a spare strip of land along a freeway, so took advantage of the freeway's grade separation.  The downtown segment is underground, while other segments follow bits of old rail line.  One especially exciting segment is a "green bridge" (transit, bikes and peds only) over the river into the University of Queensland, providing dramatically shorter trip distances than are possible by car.  Stations throughout the network are consistent with the design quality you'd expect on a modern heavy rail system in a developed country.

With the completion last year of its underground segment through downtown, Brisbane's busway has now outgrown its original inspiration, Ottawa, which never built a downtown segment and is now planning to convert its busways to rail.  Although Brisbane's busways are also designed to be convertible to light rail, no such plan is on the horizon; the long-range transport infrastructure plan envisions more extensions to the busway network.

With that in mind, here are some rather confronting images of the newest segment, which opened a few months ago. 

At the new Royal Brisbane Women's Hospital (RBWH) Station, the busway soars, rising to a third-story level on a viaduct that largely obscures the huge medical complex behind it.  This obtrusive structure was the only way to get around a particularly constrained intersection without (a) taking surface traffic lanes or (b) going underground at dramatically higher cost or (c) compromising speed and reliability in the busway.  So they did it.

I would be outraged, aesthetically, if the building had been much to look at beforehand.  It wasn't ugly, but it was a typical modernist complex (pre-busway Street View image here) so I'm not sure it's devastating that our children will never this side of it unobstructed.  (The front door of the building faces a different direction, so still looks the same.)  The buildings across the street are all industrial and office, all modern, some probably redevelopable.

A quick tour.  (As always, click any pic to enlarge.)  The top level is the busway itself, with side platforms.  As you'd expect at this height, there are views out to the east from the platform.

The middle level is a typical mezzanine, which includes direct pedestrian links into the hospital building.  Again, the infrastructure is exactly what you'd expect in an elevated rail transit station.

Looking down from the mezzanine to ground level, the building directly under the busway is the new Cycle Centre, not yet open.  This large facility that will provide bicycle storage and repair, allowing people to leave their bicycles here and take the busway into the city.  (Although the immediate surroundings are industrial, dense inner-city residential areas begin less than 1 km to the north.)

 

North of the station, the structure begins a gradual transition to the surface, but at the hospital's new pedestrian entrance, it's still so high as to be not very obtrusive.  (Whenever someone tries to horrify you with the height of a proposed viaduct, remember that higher often means less visually oppressive.)  A square archway encloses the pedestrian in a welcoming way, so that the overhead structure is turned into an aesthetic advantage.

There's an unapologetic frankness to this station, perhaps fitting the hospital that it serves.  The underside of the busway is undisguised, looking just like the underside of a freeway ramp.  You wouldn't make these choices in a visually sensitive area or one that's important to tourism, but that's not what this is.  Yes, it's a huge viaduct, and nobody is going to mistake this for one of the great transit viaducts of Europe.  But this isn't Europe.  Brisbane is a young New World city, and while it has areas of great architectural character, we're not in one of them here, so the frankness makes sense.   

Again, you don't have to like it, and I'm not sure I do.  But it is important to know that cities can choose to treat Bus Rapid Transit exactly the way they'd treat heavy rail rapid transit, as fundamental civic infrastructure where speed and reliability cannot be compromised just to get through a difficult spot.  This viaduct isn't just about serving the hospital.  About half of the bus services into the city from the north will eventually flow through this station, so any compromise on reliability through this point would have affected the viability of a large part of the city's network.  So they took reliability seriously, just as you'd do with heavy rail, and built something that works. 

UPDATE:  Plenty of lively comment on this one!  The most common question is "if you're going to build all that infrastructure, why not just put rails on it?  Answer:  Because Brisbane, like Portland, has a single very strong downtown but no major centers of activity outside of it.  For that reason, the demand pattern spreads out as you go out from the city, and the route network spreads out to follow it.  So the high frequency through this inner busway segment is made of routes that branch out to serve several different corridors further out, without requiring a connection. 

If you know Portland, imagine that instead of building eastside and westside MAX, they'd built a busway from Beaverton to Gateway, with a subway segment crossing downtown Portland.  Buses flowing through the busway would branch west of Beaverton and east of Gateway to each cover several suburban corridors beyond those points.  I'm not saying for a moment that I'd have advocated that, but its benefits would have included (a) very high frequency in the busway all day, because buses are cheaper per-unit to operate and don't pile up as frequent trains do, since they can easily pass each other, (b) direct no-change service from downtown Portland to a much larger are of outer suburbia, and (c) a fast ride across downtown for people going from one side of the city to the other, and (d) the possibility of nonstop express services on the peak, again because buses can pass each other in the busway.  Again, I'm not saying Portland should have done that, but I do want Americans to understand why Brisbane made that choice, and is pretty happy with it. 

Keep comments coming, and I'll pull the threads together in a few days.

almost there

There's something very hopeful about a new bridge on the verge of being connected.  I thought you'd enjoy a couple of photos of Brisbane's new Tank Street Bridge, also called the Kurilpa Bridge, from a couple of weeks ago.

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.

brisbane's new subway station: king george square

Hello from Brisbane, the capital of Australia's state of Queensland. I thought I'd offer some quick views of the city's almost-new underground station, at King George Square, whose first birthday is coming up on May 19.