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7 comments on BRT Moving Slower than Molasses

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Damek on April 19, 2006 - 12:07pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Finally having some time to go to one of these things, and being a relatively new UES resident who wishes we had a 2nd Ave subway wisely completed ten years ago or more, I went to this meeting knowing nothing about BRT.  I certainly didn't know this had been in the works for a long time.

Not knowing that, and having to leave after the guy from Transportation Alternatives spoke, I had a more positive reaction to the meeting, thinking "well, good, I'm glad something is going to be done about 2nd Ave transportation."

But I did get that the MTA planners were vastly underreaching, compared with what the Transportation Alternatives rep presented, and I felt that whatever was going to be done, it was likely to be a half-arsed effort.

It seems the norm in America, and New York especially, to take great ideas, even ones that have been implemented elsewhere, and then to sort of plan to fail, being overly cautious and only partially implementing important features.  Inevitably people point to these efforts as failures and the idea is never tried again anywhere.  In the meantime, the public has to suffer through a bad system that was designed to fail.

The MTA et al. seems to be heading this way with BRT.

In a city where so many rely on cars, there certainly does need to be an effort, when implementing the system, to market it properly so the public knows they can leave their cars at home and safely get to work in time.  But traffic can't get that much worse with the loss of 1-2 lanes - busses already clog up these lanes anyway.  A properly implemented full BRT system could only improve traffic...

And now I'm rambling.  Anyway, I was glad to be able to go to the forum, and glad to hear your take on it.

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crzwdjk on April 19, 2006 - 4:19pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Summary of LA's so-called BRT: They painted the buses red, in the hope that this would somehow make them go faster. Marketing is great and all, but what matters is actually improving service. A lot of the marketing around BRT, in fact, is just trying to disguise the bus as a train. I don't think it works very well. Why not just build a train in the first place?
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unplanner on April 20, 2006 - 4:52am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Cos it's cheaper not to...
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Damek on April 20, 2006 - 9:47am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
It seems to me that if you do it properly (set aside dedicated roadspace, create proper stations) you can create bus service that is just like a train, and then the only marketing you need is to let people know about it so they try it, and the service should speak for itself.

The alternative, as you mention, is to try to use the force of marketing to put a sheen on normal bus service and sort of wish it into being seen as BRT.  I certainly do hope that isn't what ends up happening here in NYC.

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crzwdjk on April 20, 2006 - 2:39pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Except it's not a train. It's got rubber tires. The vehicles are small and cramped. The ride is less comfortable. It probably runs on the street at some point. And if you spend enough money to build a "train-like" BRT, it's basically the same cost as building a train in the first place, only trains have significantly lower operation and maintenance costs, since rails last longer than pavement, and one driver can drive a single bus, or an arbitrarily long train. Also, one thing that "proper" BRT does, with its dedicated busway, is internalize the road maintenance costs to the transportation agency, rather than having them disappear into the general road maintenance budget. On the whole, not a very good deal for the transportation agency.
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