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ChineseSeeing red about Rapid buses in the Lone Star State
[tags]bus rapid transit, texas, austin, capital metro[/tags]
A Capital Metro bus in downtown Austin, Texas.
Credit: Cloverity via Flickr (Creative Commons license)
Metro’s Rapid bus network has been the brigadier general in the public relations offensive for bus rapid transit. The narrative goes: bus rapid transit builds a rail transit system without even having to lay down track, and transit users cannot tell the difference.
Metro succeeded admirably. It has built 6-lane guideways for buses, and the spare capacity can accommodate other vehicles! It has efficiently allocated the use of proof-of-fare machines by placing them on board the vehicles! The vehicles, indistinguishable from rail cars apart from the red livery, pimp-strut up to traffic lights and demand, “Where’s my green, bee-yotch?”.
Everybody buys it, except for the riders. They recognize Rapid as not only a bus, but a service that looks, feels and smells similar to limited-stop services.
And a transit rider/blogger is picking up the wafting odors in Texas. M1EK’s Bake-Sale of Bile writes about public transit in the Austin area, and the author underwhelmed by Capital Metro’s overwhelming bus rapid transit plans.
It’s not going to be too overwhelming, yet. The “opening” has been pushed back from this year to 2010.
It appears, from another article, that bus rapid transit was a bone thrown to urban Austin residents while outlying suburbs get a commuter rail line. The author argues the money should have gone to light rail, but a 2000 vote to build such a system was defeated by voters.
Instead, Austin receives BRT as a consolation prize. But M1EK predicts, in “Rapid Bus Ain’t Rapid,” a facsimile of L.A. Rapid buses.
The ability to hold the next light green for 5 or 10 seconds isn’t going to help during rush hour at all! At almost every single intersection with a traffic light, I waited through at least one green cycle before being able to proceed, since traffic was always backed up from further down the road. And this was at 6:40 PM! That means that while the bus can hold the signal at 27th green for a while longer, it doesn’t matter because the backup from 26th, 24th, 23rd, 22nd, 21st, and MLK is preventing the bus from moving anyways.
Off-bus payment is going to be irrelevant. Now that Capital Metro is using SmartCards for everything short of single-fare rides, very few people are having to take more than a second to pay when they get on the bus (this is from my own bus rides on the 983 and 3 lately). Basically, paying is no longer slowing the boarding process.
Fewer stops is already possible with the #101. This bus is still woefully slow and woefully unreliable compared to the private automobile, to say nothing of quality rail service (which could in fact beat the automobile on both counts).
The ride is going to be uncomfortable. The pavement along Guadalupe simply can’t stand the beating it gets from heavy vehicles like buses and trucks - and this is not going to change anytime soon. Rather than running down the middle of the street on rails (as light-rail would have done), the Rapid Bus vehicle will run in the right lane of the street on the same pavement abused by trucks and other buses. There is no evidence that the city is willing to pay the far higher bills required to keep this pavement in smooth-enough condition to provide a decent comfortable bus ride.
This actually goes for most BRT projects funded by the Federal Transit Administration. Very few are built to the capital-intensive projects such as the Orange Line. BRT itself is a Mad Libs approach to public transit investment, where most transit agencies can cobble together a funding proposal and pass off any grant funding as BRT.
And in L.A.’s case, Metro pulled off a great swindle. It got the feds to be on the hook for service that Metro’s planning and operations would have created anyway if left to their own devices. Los Angeles has had limited-stop service for decades. The limited-stop buses were only on a dozen lines, but really mushroomed after 1994. In the mid 1990s, Metro began to dismantle its freeway express buses since they were running for years unproductively. These buses were reallocated to local and more limited-stop bus services.
Yet here’s a little known fact. Metro does not run limited-stop buses as a faster complement to local buses. The faster service by the limited buses is a byproduct, not an intended goal. Metro only considers limited-stop service on lines that have overcrowding on locals and high volumes of boardings and alightings at intersections where transfers can be made. The logic goes that the riders would divide themselves up and take locals if they were completing a trip on the line and limiteds if they are transferring to or from another bus. The faster service by the limiteds is because of the fewer stops.
Metro took the public perception of limited buses=faster service and made it the centerpiece of the Rapid campaign. Metro targets a 25 percent speed advantage over local service. It’s a very impressive number, but this translates into a very small time savings for the average 4-6 mile trip. A 12-minute trip on a local bus would be 9 minutes on a Rapid.
And Rapid’s time advantage has little help from the magic traffic light mischief mechanisms. This is supposedly the “flux capacitor” of the entire Rapid bus operation, yet in reality it’s a McGuffin. The buses control signals only within the city of Los Angeles, and buses only receive priority if the added 10 seconds does not cause traffic to back up on cross streets. Oh, and there’s another hurdle that must be cleared: the buses must stay on schedule. The signal metes priority to one bus in a given period. If, for whatever reason, buses bunch or the leading bus is late while the follower is five minutes behind it, only one of those buses gets OK from the signal computer. In most cases, getting a green light is a crap shoot.
Rapid buses are still faster, though, but for the same reason limited-stop buses are faster: fewer stops. That’s all.
Although, another major upshot in Metro puling dough from the feds is that we can now run limited-stop buses outside of rush hours. This is the biggest benefit of Metro’s money grab, since it is reluctant to run limited-stop service outside of rush hours because the conditions or the high frequencies do not exist to run the services mid-days or weekends.
Fundamentally, though, Rapid is more modest than it’s made out to be. It’s irritating, though, because the hype drowns out the users’ thoughts. Riders are grateful for what Rapid is, not for what Metro has to market it as.
Austin and other cities are getting BRT based on the L.A. template, but remember to raise ridership by lowering expectations.
Discussion
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Thanks very much for the link. There’s an error in your HTML in the paragraph that begins:
“It appears, from another article, that bus rapid transit”
some javascript stuff shows up in the text immediately after that.
Rapid Bus, at least here, was sold as a “here’s something for central Austin that’s almost as good as rail that you can upgrade later into light rail, so, see, we ARE delivering some service improvements to the part of town where all our money comes from”. Since the election, the “you can upgrade later” has been disavowed, and the only rail extensions discussed (from the pointless commuter rail line) have been additional commuter lines which share the same critical flaw - relying on shuttle buses for distribution (since none of the existing rail lines go remotely close to the major activity centers).
Are they talking about the Orange Line or Metro Rapid? I’m so confused.
It sounds like you could still upgrade from BRT to streetcars or light rail.
It looks like you didn’t do any major upgrades: no bus lines, no grade separation for buses, no separate “stations.” Just off-board fare collection and supposed green-light changing capabilities. So, there really wasn’t any change other limiting the stops and painting the buses in a different livery!
And that means that really all they’ve done of any importance is limiting the stops, which is not an increase in bus service, but actually a DECREASE in bus service! Am I wrong on this?
Also, to the guy in Austin, you did leave out one important factor when comparing buses with streetcars: streetcars are 100% pollution free.
Also, there is no problem with streetcars being blocked by accidents if they have their own lanes, or, even better, private automobiles are barred entirely from the streets (buses, taxis and trucks doing deliveries would still be allowed).
Looks like the strange coding has disappeared. If anyone else still sees it, please let us know.
Shuttle buses are no problem, but the whole system only works if:
1. The commuter train provides a significant speed advantage.
2. The shuttle buses are frequent or guaranteed to time with trains.
Metrolink is well-patronized, and Union Station is at the northeast edge of downtown L.A. Despite Union Station being a lousy place to transfer, the trains are fast enough to mitigate the transfer penalty. At Union Station is the subway, the Gold Line and several local and DASH bus lines. DASH is run by the city of L.A., not Metro, and it’s the equivalent of Austin’s Dillo.
There is one other LADOT service, a shuttle bus using Commuter Express buses to ferry passengers between Union Station and Bunker Hill.
The station-specific shuttles are more prevalent in Orange County, which are more for people arriving to work in the county, than local residents. The locals use two cars, one to get to the station, and a jalopy at the destination station to drive to work. The station cars have caused parking problems in Metrolink (and Coaster in Oceanside) stations.
Also, Austin needs to justify doubling the fare to $1.00. They need to show that they are providing some benefit to the public for that additional fare, and enhanced bus service is one way to tell the riders that their trip will become marginally faster, although your actual trip may not be faster when all the walking is considered.
Scott,
Too many stops is actually the biggest problem with bus service in Los Angeles, and in the US in general. The 2001 Transportation Research Board report Making Transit Work noted that one of the factors that makes European bus operators so much more efficient than American ones is that the average stop spacing is something like twice as large in Europe as over here.
Limiting stops to no more than one every 1000 feet would be a huge step forward for LACMTA.
streetcars are 100% pollution free.
Did the transit elves leave a pink pony under your wishing bush last night Scott?
Ozone, particulates, ionized and microfined heavy metals, lubricants, energy generation and extreme losses.
Go ahead, ask if there has ever been a study released measuring ozone generation from LRT motors and pantographs. The EPA positively requires such studies for any mobile source.
Points from Austin:
1. Rapid bus will never be upgraded to LRT; it’s going to run in the right lane (you can’t run reserved-guideway transit in the right lane of a busy street in this country - people will accept restrictions on left turns, but restricting right turns too is a non-starter).
2. Streetcar - same thing. Will not be upgraded to reserved-guideway, ever. If it runs in the right lane, it’s going to remain a shared lane, forever.
3. Pollution - depends on source. Majority of our electricity comes from coal - but, yes, even given that, a streetcar would probably pollute a bit less than a bus.
4. Shuttle buses kill ridership among choice commuters, period. That is, if you’re trying to attract people to ride your new train who weren’t willing to ride the bus that used to go straight where they were going, there’s zero chance they’re going to take your new train if it ALSO involves a slow, stuck-in-traffic, shuttle-bus ride twice a day. This is why commuter rail generally performs so poorly compared to light rail (which can be routed to run in the street the last N miles to get you to within walking distance of your office).