Matt Yglesias

38 Responses to “BRT Done Right”

1. Edward, the mad shirt grinder Says:
   September 30th, 2008 at 5:16 pm

   Bogota, Colombia has a pretty good BRT system, too. The buses run at very short intervals and are crammed to the gills with people. Unfortunately, all the other buses there are privatized smoke-belching monstrosities.

2. Amanda Says:
   September 30th, 2008 at 6:16 pm

   The VTA in San Jose needs to take a hint-Santa Clara County is so spread out, that both bus rides and light rail lines take forever to get to where you need to go. Creating more limited stop buses, giving them the right of way, blah blah blah-all easy stuff to do.

3. Linkmeister Says:
   September 30th, 2008 at 6:54 pm

   The big issue between our two candidates for mayor (Honolulu) in November is precisely this one: bus vs. steel-on-steel rail. Traffic is such that something has to be done, but is a $4B fixed-guideway rail system which necessarily doesn’t have many spurs to outlying areas when first built really the right way to go?

   Stay tuned.

4. Mo Says:
   September 30th, 2008 at 7:29 pm

   Yes, let us tear down the medieval city walls throughout America and build boulevards with express lanes and local traffic lanes!!! /snark

   The Paris system is great, but it is rather contingent on the multilane wide roads that already traverse the city. And those were built when the old city was largely torn down to build the new one. Just to insert a bit of Shock Doctrine, the redesign was intended to put an end to the urban warfare that had been characterizing the capital since the revolution. The boulevards were too wide to be barricaded for defense.

5. foobar Says:
   September 30th, 2008 at 7:47 pm

   I am also a honolulu resident, and I see the BRT proposal (basically, Ann Kobayashi’s platform) to be fraught with exactly the danger MY mentions: it will get whittled down year by year to nothing more than a modest supplement to TheBus. Part of the problem, in this respect, is that Honolulu believes its own PR that TheBus is some kind of advanced transportation system (Nationally Acclaimed!), when it is in fact poorly laid out (the #1 goes from downtown to Hawaii Kai stopping every 200 meters! have you seen the route the #14 takes?), does a poor job of providing route information (maps and schedules at stops: maybe in a a few Waikiki or downtown locations), and is generally slow and unreliable. Honolulu needs the example of a full-scale transit line to discover what TheBus fails to deliver.

   My own preference for Honolulu would have been to build a number of shorter light-rail systems covering shorter-distance corridors. But, as often happens in the US, people want to build the complete solution in one go, taking forever to get there. I would have started with 1) get the tourists out of cars: build a short line from the Zoo to (say) Kakaako via Kuhio and Ala Moana (~$200M) then moved on to other line, including something from downtown to the airport, etc. The current plan is trying to address current living patterns rather than encourage densification in the areas flanking downtown. But, i could probably write an entire blog on Honolulu re-development suggestions…

6. Adam Villani Says:
   September 30th, 2008 at 8:13 pm

   I take BRT in L.A. every day (the Orange Line, across the San Fernando Valley), and it’s pretty good. The big problem is that it’s just too popular for its own good. Even running every five minutes or so during rush hour, it inevitably becomes standing room only, and often is packed to capacity. Each bus holds what, 65 people? Something like that. Compare with a light rail line or subway that can hold several times that amount with one driver.

7. Stephen Rose Says:
   September 30th, 2008 at 8:15 pm

   Buses would be king if we could get cars off the road. In my novel Panflick The Boston Car Wars, I assume the advent of free buses used as a form of advertising using rights of way which belong again to the people, not people driving private automobiles and taking up all the space.

8. pseudonymous in nc Says:
   September 30th, 2008 at 9:06 pm

   Bendy buses have been considered a curse on the streets of London, where the plan is very much not Hausmann boulevards. In planned cities (i.e. the US) they do work. But they can also make it difficult to put cycle lanes on the same routes. That’s less of an issue when there are alternative arteries (or ‘capillary’ routes) but the the ideal approach in suburban environments is often off-the-highway cyclepaths.

9. Kolohe Says:
   September 30th, 2008 at 9:52 pm

   I think TheBus of Oahu is a pretty good system especially compared to other bus only systems.

   It’s really solid (but pretty crowded these days) wrt to the express busses for the AM and PM commutes.
   (fwiw, they recently revised 1 to get a partial stop bus; I’m actually expecting them to get something like the E, another non-rush hour express)

   My biggest problem is that you can’t really take it to or from the airport unless your going only interisland due to the restiction on baggage that you can carry onboard. (or pack really light, which prevents presents)

   I like the rail proposal by Mufi; Kobayashi’s is an alternative just for the sake of saying “I’m different.” (OTOH, Panos’ proposals were well thought out – the one they should implement is converting some intersections to thoroughfare underpasses along King/Brettania, Kapiolani, and Ala Moana/Nimitz)

   The biggest issue I have with the rail is one of the things you mentioned, that they’re starting from Waipahu to Kapolei, rather than Airport/Salt Lake (or even Kaimuki) to downtown. This is really dumb. First, nobody travels just that distance, at least not at rush hour. So it’s going to start and going to get a heap of critism. DC started their system with the red line from dupont to metro center, they didn’t start Vienna to Ballston.

   The other is that it seems like it’s going to take an awfully long time. Ground won’t even be broken for another year, and I think the first rider won’t be until 2012 I think.

10. Kolohe Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 9:54 pm

    Oh the other problem I have with the bus is from Windward, where I live now, it’s awfully hard to get anywhere else than downtown Central business district. It would be nice to have one route on H-3 between Windward and Pearlridge at least.

11. Kolohe Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 9:59 pm

    One other thing per foobar’s comment.

    Tourists on the road aren’t a lot of the traffic problem. Many of them are in tour groups (and thus buses) anyway, or are just staying in Waikiki and cabbing everywhere. They’ll take a car to get to North Shore, but that’s it.

    The traffic problem rush hour: specicifcally that attroicious mess at H1-H2 starting at 5 am every single day, and then the middle street merge starting at 7 (this one because the genius that designed the intersection has it so essentially a 5 lane freeway completely disappears in the space of half of mile)

12. thm Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 10:01 pm

    “BRT” is a poorly-defined chimera, whose promoters like to talk about expensive systems when the topic if features, and featureless systems when the topic is cost.

    Whether it can be put in place faster than rail really, really depends on what you mean by it. Sure, repaint a few buses and move the stops apart, that’s quick. But do you mean a bus system of equal capacity to a rail system can be put in place faster? A system with equal schedule speed? A system with equal ride comfort? I would argue that you can’t put a bus-based system in place faster than rail and meet any of these criteria.

    Damage to roads, incidentally, scales with the fourth power of axle weight: double the weight, get sixteen times the road damage. In this regard, buses are the most damaging vehicles on the road, and vehicle codes make special exceptions to allow buses, whose axle weight can then be larger than that of tractor-trailers. This, incidentaly, is why in DC the places where the buses stop, at bus stops, are paved in concrete instead of asphalt. As you try to scale up the capacity, you add more buses, and that really wears down the roads, and you can get rutting, as happened with LA’s Orange Line and Boston’s Silver Line. Is it really that much faster to repave an entire route in concrete than it would be to lay rail along the same route? Is it really BRT if you’re just talking about regular asphalt roads?

    Bottom line is, any bus based system that can be put in place faster than rail is also going to be markedly inferior in terms of ride quality, speed, and capacity.

13. Kolohe Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 10:11 pm

    Last thing-
    But, i could probably write an entire blog on Honolulu re-development suggestions…
    You’d have me for a reader.

14. DTM Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 10:19 pm

    thm,

    Well, what about coverage?

    The thing about BRT is you can run the buses on regular surface streets and highways where congestion isn’t a serious issue, then switch to something like dedicated lanes or busways only for the parts of the relevant routes where congestion is a problem. In contrast, with trains you have to run the tracks for each entire route you would want to serve. So, that is why in some cases you can get BRT systems with much greater total coverage than you could get with trains at the same cost, since with BRT you can make use of a lot of existing infrastructure for parts of your routes.

15. piotr Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 10:21 pm

    In Warsaw, Poland, there is a single subway line, a number of streetcar lines and about 100 bus routes. Many routes have express options: few stops in an outer sub-municipality, a few in the center, then again a few in a sub-municipality on the other side of the center. They are much faster than normal buses, except that they are stuck in the traffic jams. There are few streets which are closed to traffic other then taxis and buses, so no traffic jams there.

    In NE NJ, trains can be very slow, and they bring you to Newark where you can change to a Manhattan train. Much faster option is provided by express buses, often from capacious and free Park and Ride parking lots (the lot is free, but the tickets are emphatically not free, so it is a package deal). The problem is that the buses are duly stuck in traffic as they spiral down to Lincoln Tunnel. A dedicated lane would help. Possibility: buses would not occupy the entire capacity of such a lane, so perhaps auction the rest of the capacity in the form of variable toll. The non-bus toll in bus-free lane would rise and fall according to the traffic, so this lane would always move at a reasonable clip, with the current price displayed above the roadway.

16. Linus Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 10:22 pm

    Curitiba, Brazil, and all.

    If LA gets an appropriate number of buses will South America get an appropriate number of (non-redundant regional) factories?

    I’d like to buy a fine Argentine double for less than the cost of a Ruger Red Label; it’s a shame they don’t exist.

17. jim moore Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 11:21 pm

    For intra city transport I think that the key is to use a hub based transport system. Every type of transportation technology has distance range over witch it best suited. I would like to suggest that for intra city travel 3 distinct modes of movement should be used. Walking is ideal for distances of 1 to couple of 100 meters ( now of course walking for much longer distances is easily done just more costly in terms of time.) Next comes bikes / electric bikes / electric scooters / segways? which are good over the distances of ~100 meters to ~ 5 kilometers (~ 3 miles) (again you can go further but it becomes more costly in terms of time) Finally you get bus / train which would be used for distances of ~ 5 kilometers to ~ 100 kilometers (the width of the city).

    Depending on density you have a transport hub in the center of a circle with a two to five kilometer radius. You have enough hubs so that everyone in the city is at most 5 kilometers from the nearest hub. Buses only travel between hubs and they only pick up and drop off people at hubs. To get from from the hub to your destination you are a member of a bike / scooter / segway share program that has big depots at every hub and little depots on just about every block.

    So a commute would go something like this; you walk out of your house to the e-bike depot at the end of the block. You hop on a e-bike and ride the mile to the nearest hub (time from house to hub less than 5 minutes). You drop off the e-bike and hop on the bus to the hub nearest your place of work ( with fairly regular travel patterns it might be possible to optimize the the bus system so that you go directly to your destination hub without stopping at other hubs along the way). At the destination hub you pick up a different e-bike and ride to your work place which has an e-bike depot.

    I think this type of system would be efficient, fast, flexible and inexpensive.

18. Eric Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 8:38 am

    BRT has a scalability factor, kind of a menu of options a municipality can select from. These can range from making it work almost exactly like a tram-line, with raised stations and dedicated bus lines, or to smaller measures that can reduce embarkation times and bus coordination measures to prevent bus bunching. A big factor is spreading stops apart and casting the BRT as separate from local lines. This way you will stop getting the old ladies who just ride the bus all day because they have nothing else to do, and start pulling in daily commuters who want to get to work destinations as fast as possible.

    The big key for American cities may be the dedicated bus lane, which can be unpopular and difficult to implement, politically. But speed is the prime value here — once you push mass transit speeds above personal transit speeds, you’ll have your commuters start moving over. This tumbles through in positive effects, since you’re getting more fares at an economy of scale and can afford to improve the system even more.

19. James Wimberley Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 8:45 am

    The system was invented forty years ago by Jaime Lerner in Curutiba, a mid-sized city in Brazil – it’s more advanced than anything in Paris. See this Wikipedia article.

20. Cooper Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 9:38 am

    If you want a poorly designed example of BRT visit Boston and ride the “new” Silver Line. Half T (Boston rail) and half Bus but a pretty poor example of both.
    BRT doesn’t work if the buses still do not move any faster than the cars/congestion around them.

21. Chris Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 10:38 am

    If you ever want to see this one in real life, and not too far away, there’s an excellent BRT system in Ottawa, Ontario.

    It operates occasionally on city streets but largely on bus-only lanes that run next to major highways. There’s no access to regular traffic.

    They’ve also recently added a light rail system that I’ve heard is powered by a pickup truck engine, but I can’t confirm it.

22. Adriana Says:
    October 2nd, 2008 at 12:31 pm

    After visiting Bogota, I have to say that it puts both the LA and Ottawa systems to shame. The quality of the infrastructure is phenomenal (ie the stations – they really are stations, not glorified bus stops or shelters, 2 lanes for the BRT in each drection), and the BRT is clearly distinct from regular bus service, and excels at offering regional commuting (long-distance service really stands out for the time-savings to commuters).

    If anyone out there is really serious about looking at best-practices in BRT Bogota is it, maybe Periera Colombia for a smaller city scenario. This is the next major evolution after Curitiba.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA4IR7PvO6I

    For trolley bus BRT a city in Venezuela, Merida has some pretty attrative stations – http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/5452/dscf0184as3.jpg

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