A BRT Plan for DC
Dave Alpert reports that “A committee of the Transportation Planning Board has developed a Bus Rapid Transit network proposal spanning the entire region, from Laurel to Lorton.” I’d like to see this eventually become the map of a streetcar system for the Washington, DC area but you couldn’t complete such a project in time to qualify for an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant. And a good BRT system could lay the groundwork for a future upgrade to rail. Besides which, this system would be a very useful thing to have on its own terms, so I hope other leaders in the region will get behind it:
The “rapid transit” elements in this “bus rapid transit” plan are “signal priority, some exclusive lanes or queue jumpers in congested areas, bus stops with fare prepayment and electronic real-time bus information, and low-floor buses” which could be done for about $200 million.
My only concern about this is that I don’t understand why the Orange Line of this network stops in Foggy Bottom when it seems like you could add a lot of value by extending the line slightly to Georgetown.
47 Responses to “A BRT Plan for DC”
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April 16th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
You’ve said something about this before but what are the reasons (besides the futuristic excitingness factor, which I don’t deny) to prefer streetcars to buses? It seems to me that buses have some obvious advantages over streetcars, e.g. the ability to go around slow-moving/broken-down vehicles (including other transit vehicles. God forbid a streetcar breaks down.), no need to lay down track, not being wedded to a specific route in case transit needs change, and probably others.
April 16th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
The story I’ve heard (perhaps apocryphal) about Georgetown is that they turned down the opportunity to have the metro run that way because they didn’t want poor folks to have easy access to their part of town.
April 16th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
is it just accepted that subways are too expensive to build these days – cause street cars and buses rapid transit or not are a tedious ass way to get around
April 16th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
what are the reasons (besides the futuristic excitingness factor, which I don’t deny) to prefer streetcars to buses?
-smoother ride
-larger capacity
And the permanence of laying down track has advantages too:
-People unfamiliar with the neighborhood can find high-frequently transit stations more easily. If I drop you off in a neighborhood at 10pm and show you five intersections, can you tell which ones are active bus stops, which ones are discontinued bus stops, and which active bus stops are for lines that stop running at 8pm?
-Creating permanent infrastructure sends a signal to business owners and potential residents that certain areas will have frequent, reliable transit for years to come. This allows for the formation of neighborhoods and shopping districts, particularly in gentrifying areas.
April 16th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Further, “flexibility” has always seemed like a pretty bogus so-called advantage of buses to me. If you take a look at the routes of central-city buses in any older city, most of the major routes will have changed little, if at all, in decades. In fact, many current bus routes follow the route of an even older streetcar. The city is built – the major bus routes aren’t going anywhere, so it’s okay if we build some permanent infrastructure for them.
April 16th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Buses are a far more cost-effective form of mass transit than rail. Few or no urban rail transit systems in the United States produce benefits greater than their costs, which is why they are so limited. Light rail provides less than 4% of total passenger-miles of transit in the U.S. and about the share of transit trips.
April 16th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Matt, why does the Orange stop short? Last time I was in Georgetown I was told the locals hate mass transit because it “brings in the riff-raff.”
April 16th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
“The “rapid transit” elements in this “bus rapid transit” plan are “signal priority, some exclusive lanes or queue jumpers in congested areas, bus stops with fare prepayment and electronic real-time bus information, and low-floor buses”
Sounds like London’s system for the most part. I can’t say it’s particularly rapid, but I use it all the time.
“You’ve said something about this before but what are the reasons (besides the futuristic excitingness factor, which I don’t deny) to prefer streetcars to buses?”
I don’t understand the psychology myself, beyond the fact that the stops are usually announced – which could be and sometimes is easily rectified on buses – but there are plenty of people who would never take a bus who are willing to ride trams. So you’re (potentially) reaching a different segment of the car driving audience. That’s certainly been the argument in the UK.
April 16th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Electric streetcars are a lot cleaner than diesel buses, and don’t need to go in for refueling.
April 16th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
It’s an easy joke about Georgetown, but for the 1,000,000 time, the original story is a myth. Has anyone here actually been to Georgetown? The easiest way to convert your “BRT” into ordinary “BT” would be to shoehorn it onto M Street.
Closing the Whitehurst Freeway and laying streetcar tracks along it would be pretty cool, though. You could run from Foggy Bottom past Georgetown, and then out MacArthur.
April 16th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
You could run the bus into Georgetown, but the odds of securing signal priority, dedicated lanes, and/or queue jumping options are basically nil. And Georgetown is already fairly well served by slow-moving, unpredictable, non-rapid-transit buses.
April 16th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Electric streetcars are a lot cleaner than diesel buses
What about hybrid-electric buses and CNG buses? What about streetcars powered by electricity generated from coal? What about streetcar routes with very low ridership? And does this include the pollution costs of building and maintaining streetcar lines, or only the pollution costs of operating them?
April 16th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
BRT from Rockville to College Park would cut about 45 minutes off of a friend of mine’s commute. That’s a badly needed mass transit upgrade, as is the connection to Laurel. Unlike some of the Metro extension fantasy maps you’ve posted, these people seem to be on the right track.
April 16th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
I think biggest reason the Metro didn’t go to Georgetown was because of the engineering challenges drilling through bedrock and making a hard turn to go under the river to the target areas in Northern Virginia. I believe most of the Metro system was (relatively cheaper, easier) “cut-and-cover” through the dirt/clay/sand of the coastal plain, with the red line stretch through Dupont being the biggest section to drill through solid rock.
April 16th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
I don’t understand the psychology myself, beyond the fact that the stops are usually announced – which could be and sometimes is easily rectified on buses – but there are plenty of people who would never take a bus who are willing to ride trams.
Yeah, it’s psychology, and I think some of it applies to London: tourists and infrequent visitors use the Tube even when the bus might be faster or more pleasant because you can’t get lost on the Tube map, but you can end up in Dalston or Peckham Rye if you miss your stop on the bus.
Trams provide a degree of above-ground permanence to the network — follow the tramline and you’ll find a tram stop soon enough. That’s the way it works in Amsterdam. There are specifics, too: trams simply don’t have the stigma of buses in contemporary American society.
April 16th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
“Light rail provides less than 4% of total passenger-miles of transit in the U.S.”
Source? Are you including areas which actually even have light rail, or all areas with any kind of transit at all, even those which have never flirted with rail?
By way of example, Portland’s light rail system delivered about 45% of bus & rail passenger-miles in FY2008, even though as a percentage of route-miles or vehicle-miles or operator-hours it is way less than that.
And those statistics do not include the Portland Streetcar, which is operated by a separate agency, even though transit users are (generally) free to move between systems using the same fare instruments and tend to think of everything as being part of the same transit system. (Which is as it should be).
April 16th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
PS… My source:
http://www.trimet.org/pdfs/publications/trimetridership.pdf
April 16th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Georgetown hates the poor. I’m pretty sure the metro tunnels right underneath it but god forbid the people who work there have easy transportation to get there.
Same deal for Cleveland Park. If you’re in the metro tunnel and stopped there you can see original signage for a station called “Cleveland Park/Zoo” (Cleveland Park is WAY closer to the zoo than Woodley Park by FAR). But, like Georgetown, Cleveland Park hates people that don’t live there. But it goes far beyond that.
April 16th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Source?
BTS Table 1-37: U.S. Passenger-Miles
April 16th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Nothing planned for the next five hours, “charles”, except to spout the same old shit in the hope that someone takes the bait?
April 16th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
I see, Charles… the table you provide is for ALL OF THE US, including those places which never had, and never will, and never should have rail transit.
That’s no way to argue about whether rail transit works when built where it is appropriate to build it.
April 16th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
-smoother ride
As a practical matter, this is definitely true. But to a large degree, that’s a matter of choice, no? How does the cost of installing and maintaining streetcar tracks compare with ensuring decently paved roads along bus routes? (Something which it seems reasonable to have anyway)
-larger capacity
This one I don’t follow at all. Why would this be?
-People unfamiliar with the neighborhood can find high-frequently transit stations more easily. If I drop you off in a neighborhood at 10pm and show you five intersections, can you tell which ones are active bus stops, which ones are discontinued bus stops, and which active bus stops are for lines that stop running at 8pm?
I’m not convinced by this one either. I’m not sure what this business about discontinued bus stops is. I don’t see why that would be more of a problem for buses than for streetcars. I suppose you’re saying that streetcars are better because if I dropped you down in random neighborhood and you know that there’s a streetcar line nearby, then you can say, “Hey, a streetcar! They have frequent and late-night service! I can take that!” But of course if you knew that a high frequency/late-night bus route was nearby, you could say the same thing. The problem, then, seems to be that buses are hard to keep track of. There’s a whole lot of them, they go all over the place, and some are frequent and some are not. You can’t be expected to keep the whole mess of bus routes and frequencies in your head. Well, fine, divide your bus system into two: red buses (think of them as streetcars with wheels) and blue buses (think of them as buses with wheels). Now to be confident while being dropped into random neighborhoods, you just need to keep track of the red bus routes, which isn’t any harder than keeping track of the streetcar routes they’re replacing.
Of course, I think it often doesn’t even need to be that complicated. Where I live there’s both streetcar and bus routes. It’s true that when I’m taking the streetcar, I don’t need to wonder about how frequent the service is. But then I hardly ever worry about that when I’m taking a bus either, even when I’m in an area that I’m not very familiar with. The reason for that is that I’m usually taking the bus on a fairly major street and I know that fairly major streets have frequent bus service. In fact, I think I usually worry more about the wait for streetcars because after standing there for a while, I have to wonder if there hasn’t been a breakdown or accident of some kind that’s going to block service for the next half hour. That kind of thing doesn’t happen with buses.
-Creating permanent infrastructure sends a signal to business owners and potential residents that certain areas will have frequent, reliable transit for years to come.
Yeah, I have to admit that even as I wrote that I was like, “Yeah, maybe this is one of those theoretical advantages that doesn’t really play out in the real world.” Like shabadoo says, though, the lack of a signal probably doesn’t really matter that much since bus routes really don’t tend to change anyway. If it does matter, hell, just legislate that you won’t change the route for 30 years or something.
Spike: Electric streetcars are a lot cleaner than diesel buses, and don’t need to go in for refueling.
Is there any reason why a bus couldn’t run using whatever system a streetcar would? In fact, trolleybuses (as I just learned they’re called) do exactly that.
charles: Light rail provides less than 4% of total passenger-miles of transit in the U.S. and about the share of transit trips.
You could claim by some kind of “wisdom of crowds” justification that this reveals that light rail is inferior to buses (even then you’d have to compare the miles-travelled with buses, not everything else in the world), but this is one area where I’m not inclined to think that the crowds have been very wise.
April 16th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
I see, Charles… the table you provide is for ALL OF THE US, including those places which never had, and never will, and never should have rail transit. That’s no way to argue about whether rail transit works when built where it is appropriate to build it.
It suggests that there are very few, if any, places where rail transit is or would be “appropriate” or “works.” For the vast majority of actual and potential transit routes, buses are far more cost-effective, as I said.
April 16th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
You could claim by some kind of “wisdom of crowds” justification that this reveals that light rail is inferior to buses (even then you’d have to compare the miles-travelled with buses, not everything else in the world), but this is one area where I’m not inclined to think that the crowds have been very wise.
Why? And it’s not a matter of the “wisdom of crowds,” unless by that you mean the democratic process. If light rail is generally superior to buses, why is light rail such a tiny share of our total transit system?
April 16th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
‘Cuz Georgetown doesnt like black people.
April 16th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
For BRT to be a lesser version of a streetcar rather than a pig of a bus with lipstick, it needs things like signal priority, permanent and separate rights-of-way, and speedy fare collection so that businesses will be more desirous of opening up on the route. This actually is pretty cheap in cities with wide enough streets or enough redundancy in the street layout that you can dedicate two lanes to the BRT and maybe turn some adjacent quieter streets into thoroughfares. I believe DC, and most other American cities, is such a city. For an object lesson in how *not* to do BRT, just look at Boston’s Silver Line. It doesn’t have any of the features that make it more pleasant or more efficient than a regular old bus.
April 16th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
It’s interesting to compare U.S. cities with, say, Toronto and Melbourne, which are culturally as close to the U.S. as you can get, and have extensive streetcar systems that people seem generally pleased with.
April 16th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Cleveland Park is WAY closer to the zoo than Woodley Park by FAR
I was going to say that this is several levels too strong a statement, because I had thought that Cleveland Park was very slightly closer to the zoo, but as far as I can gather from looking at maps, it’s just not true at all. The Zoo is about midway between the two stops, but it appears to be very slightly closer to Woodley Park – about .37 miles from Woodley Park, and .39 from Cleveland Park. At any rate, Cleveland Park is certainly not WAY closer to the zoo than Woodley Park by FAR.
When I was a kid and we went to the zoo, we would always get off at Cleveland Park, walk down to the zoo, and then when we left, continue walking down to the Woodley Park station, because it’s all downhill going southwards.
Why? And it’s not a matter of the “wisdom of crowds,” unless by that you mean the democratic process. If light rail is generally superior to buses, why is light rail such a tiny share of our total transit system?
So we live in the best of all possible worlds, then? This is just pure question-begging.
April 16th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Why? And it’s not a matter of the “wisdom of crowds,” unless by that you mean the democratic process. If light rail is generally superior to buses, why is light rail such a tiny share of our total transit system?
charles, a lot of people (especially the people who will read what you’re writing here) are of the opinion that public transit policy in the US has been, shall we say, mishandled. Given this, can you see why your argument here might be seen as unconvincing?
April 16th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Speaking of mass transit, we ought to rebuild this
April 16th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
John,
So we live in the best of all possible worlds, then?
No, I don’t think so. If light rail is generally superior to buses, why is light rail such a tiny share of our total transit system?
April 16th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
charles, a lot of people (especially the people who will read what you’re writing here) are of the opinion that public transit policy in the US has been, shall we say, mishandled. Given this, can you see why your argument here might be seen as unconvincing?
Do you have an actual, shall we say, argument as to why light rail is not much more widespread, if it is generally better than buses? Why does Los Angeles, for example, have almost 200 bus routes but only 3 light rail lines, if light rail is generally superior to buses?
April 16th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
I don’t need to have a counter-argument if what I’m doing is pointing out that yours isn’t convincing. You could make your argument a lot more efficient though, if not more convincing. Just say, “To those who think that public transit policy in the US has been badly handled in some respect: if it was so bad why did they do it that way?” That will cover light rail and everything else in one go.
Hey, Matt, if streetcars would be better, why are they doing high speed buses instead? Hmm? (Oh wait, Matt actually covered that in his post.)
April 16th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
I don’t need to have a counter-argument if what I’m doing is pointing out that yours isn’t convincing.
If you claim that light rail is generally better than buses, you most definitely need an argument to support that claim, and an explanation for why light rail is so much rarer than buses if it is better than buses. Do you have one? No, of course you don’t. Hence all the evasion.
April 16th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
If you claim that light rail is generally better than buses, you most definitely need an argument to support that claim
charles, if you read this thread very carefully, you’ll notice that I never claimed that. In fact, I’ve claimed exactly the opposite. And yet, amazingly, I’m able to recognize a weak argument even when I agree with its conclusions.
April 16th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
charles, if you read this thread very carefully, you’ll notice that I never claimed that.
Great. Then we agree.
And yet, amazingly, I’m able to recognize a weak argument even when I agree with its conclusions.
So weak, apparently, that you cannot come up with even a single plausible alternative explanation for the overwhelming dominance of buses over light rail.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
My only concern about this is that I don’t understand why the Orange Line of this network stops in Foggy Bottom when it seems like you could add a lot of value by extending the line slightly to Georgetown.
At first, I thought it might have been the expense of crossing Rock Creek park. But looking at a the detailled plan and a map of the area, extending it on/under the whitehurst freeway would be the easiest part of the plan; definitely easier than compeletely rebuilding K Street.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
A commenter on Alpert’s site points to this as the latest plan, which does appear to go through G-Town. (the olive drab Wisconsin ave line)
April 16th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Plus an immesely valuable Columbia Pike line.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
Kolohe, if streetcars came in the Whitehurst, they could keep right on going down K St.
April 17th, 2009 at 12:16 am
if streetcars came in the Whitehurst, they could keep right on going down K St.
Yep, that’s what I was trying to say. And that’s where they were basically before; until recently you could still see the tracks in some places. (based on google street view, they finally fixed up K street under the overpass and put a park next to the river)
I’m also taking about this project listed as part of the overall BRT plan. It is no small undertaking.
April 17th, 2009 at 4:42 am
If it makes sense to you, it’s probably made sense to them, but it’s probably some weird cocktail of budget, easements, and God knows what else that prevents it.
I never understood why BART didn’t go to SFO when I lived in San Francisco in the mid to late 90s, even though that’s a different situation, but they eventually got it done.
April 17th, 2009 at 5:59 am
Nick, your questions are old, I have seen it rehashed here many times…
So the short answer, without link, but the gist is there:
It is well known that bus / light rail /subway have different optimal (economic and functional) maximal riderships, which is the main parameter.
let say respectively between 100 and 3000, 1500 and 15000, 8000 and 30000 people/hour(*)
You have a slight overlap, and inside those, you can decide according to some other parameters (politics, financing, distribution of ridership over the day, demographic evolution, geography and street space…).
You can search the exact numbers, BUT: there are KNOWN and it is not an opinion nor a matter of faith à la Mixner/Charles.
It is a matter of transport engineering: investment vs. maintenance costs, doable frequencies, capacity of the single vehicles, boarding times…
BRT is a strange beast, which can be morphed in a bus or a light rail category. However, the engineering of making it like a street car costs like a street car, in space (dedicated lanes) and money (number of vehicles, adaptation for fast boarding, slightly less investment but more costs to use (basically pneumatic vs steel and engine vs. electric motor). Without the urban planing advantage of morphing the neighbourhood over the long haul, nor the psychological acceptance by the public.
Short: BRT is not to be excluded a priori, but likely optimal in very few and narrow cases.
(*): you can go to over 100,000 p/h with what I would call a mix between heavy subway/local trains, see Japan major urban lines,RER in Paris, but let start slowly in the US…
April 17th, 2009 at 6:12 am
Nick, your questions are old, I have seen it rehashed here many times…
So the short answer, without link, but the gist is there:
It is well known that bus / light rail /subway have different optimal (economic and functional) maximal riderships, which is the main parameter.
let say respectively between 100 and 3000, 1500 and 15000, 8000 and 30000 people/hour(*)
You have a slight overlap, and inside those, you can decide according to some other parameters (politics, financing, distribution of ridership over the day, demographic evolution, geography and street space…).
You can search the exact numbers, BUT: there are KNOWN and it is not an opinion nor a matter of faith à la Mixner/Charles.
It is a matter of transport engineering: investment vs. maintenance costs, doable frequencies, capacity of the single vehicles, boarding times…
BRT is a strange beast, which can be morphed in a bus or a light rail category. However, the engineering of making it like a street car costs like a street car, in space (dedicated lanes) and money (number of vehicles, adaptation for fast boarding, slightly less investment but more costs to use (basically pneumatic vs steel and engine vs. electric motor). Without the urban planing advantage of morphing the neighbourhood over the long haul, nor the psychological acceptance by the public.
Short: BRT is not to be excluded a priori, but likely optimal in very few and narrow cases.
(*): you can go to over 100,000 p/h with what I would call a mix between heavy subway/local trains, see Japan major urban lines,RER in Paris, but let start slowly in the US…
Sorry… forgot to say great post – can’t wait to read your next one!
April 17th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Kolohe @ nos. 38 & 39: Thanks for the link. The thing about the Columbia Pike line is that the inner half of it is already in operation: It’s called the 16Y line, and I ride it every day. What make it work is that when there is a backup on Route 50 caused by the merge from two lanes to one to get on the Roosevelt Bridge, the bus goes around it and squeezes in. Which is listed somewhere above as one of the criteria for BRT.
What puzzles me about this is that Arlington County is already spending substantial money to develop a streetcar line from Bailey’s Crossroads to Pentagon City. Can BRT and streetcars coexist — physically or economically?
April 17th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Giulio, if you could point me towards some sources for information on this topic I would greatly appreciate it. I’m genuinely curious since it’s not at all clear to me why streetcars would ever be preferable. Well, except for psychological reasons which I admit are considerable (whatever I rationally think about the issue, I vastly prefer taking streetcars to buses).
April 20th, 2009 at 1:03 am
[...] Matt Yglesias points to a bus rapid transit (BRT) plan for Washington DC, which looks pretty awesome. Ygelsias says he hopes that these one day become streetcars, but I don’t know. While I don’t know DC that well, I’m not so sure that streetcars are necessarily suited to replace BRT in all cases. [...]