Subway on the Streets

An interesting article in the New York Magazine about that city’s embrace of bus lanes over the past few years, and how they are providing excellent public transport “bang” for a fairly limited “buck”.

Here are a couple of parts (but the whole thing is well worth a read):

You would never guess it from the dispiriting news coming out of the MTA, but if you want to see the future of New York, then head up to the Bronx and take a bus. This is not the future of New York in which everyone has a solar-powered jet pack that takes them high over the city’s organic farmyards. Nor is this the apocalyptic future in which the final few New Yorkers with health care live just beyond the moat that surrounds what was once called Yankee Stadium. This is the future as seen in a new bus line: the Bx12 Select Bus Service, or SBS, for short.

The future highlighted by the Bx12 SBS takes as a very depressing starting point the fact that the New York City subway system, once the envy of the world, is stalled. Not literally—as when we sat on dark, un-air-conditioned cars between stations on the way to Simon and Garfunkel reunion concerts—but still, our subways are strained under a ridership that has grown 60 percent since 1990 and a permanent budgetary crisis that has, over the past two years, only gotten worse. Last month, faced with an $800 million budget gap, the MTA canceled two subway lines and 37 bus lines and dramatically reduced late-night and weekend service. No one is expecting Albany’s fiscal situation to improve anytime soon…

…So the future of movement in New York—how we get from home to work, how we navigate the city—is not going to be about subways. But what about the bus? True, buses are what most people think of when they think of not getting anywhere: senior citizens waiting in lines, guys counting out change, double-parked cars. They are less sexy than subways and tend to be ignored until the MTA announces another round of service cuts. The last time buses were new was in the forties, when they were installed around the city as a cheaper, more flexible alternative to streetcars.

To a large extent, flexibility remains the bus’s chief advantage—unrailed, they can go wherever we want them to go—and they’re a relative bargain. But over the last decade, in a few transit-enlightened cities around the world, the bus has received a dramatic makeover. It has been reengineered to load passengers more quickly. It has become much more energy-efficient. And, most important, the bus system—the network of bus lines and its relationship to the city street—has been rethought. Buses that used to share the street with cars and trucks are now driving in lanes reserved exclusively for buses and are speeding through cities like trains in the street. They are becoming more like subways…

…The MTA and the city’s Department of Transportation recently unveiled plans to install dedicated bus lanes on First and Second Avenues this fall and on 34th Street in 2012. These, along with the Bx12 line in the Bronx, are being promoted as trial programs for what Walder hopes will be, by the end of his tenure, a reconfiguration of the city’s streets. “When the city adopts a world-class ‘Bus Rapid Transit’ system, people are going to have a tough time, efficiency-wise, telling a bus apart from a subway—it’s going to be like a subway with a view,” predicts Kyle Wiswall, general counsel for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign…

…All of the sudden, though, here it comes: the Bx12. Right away, you see it’s different. A different paint job—new branding, as the transit people like to say—and bright-blue lights flashing on the header. Buying a ticket is different, too: You pay before you board, from a little box like a MetroCard vending machine that offers you a receipt. In the world of transit planning, boarding time is everything, and the receipt streamlines the process. “You just hold on to it,” a woman offers, shouting from under her earbuds. She smiles. “It’s much faster.”

Waiting on the curb, you notice that the bus has its own lane, painted terra-cotta, with signs to deflect non-bus traffic. It is not a physically separated lane, the holy grail of Bus Rapid Transit. But it is a lane, and your fellow riders speak of police who patrol it regularly during rush hours. You see the big, roomy bus shelter holding enough people to fill a subway car, and you wonder if everyone will be able to get on. But when the Bx12 SBS pulls up, this monster of mundaneness opens up not one but two doors. If there is a heaven for bus drivers, it has buses with rear-door entrances.

The transit-interested rider, upon seeing a bus this size pull up at a station with two-dozen prepaid fares, breaks out his stopwatch. Traffic geeks know that about a third of bus delays comes from passenger-boarding issues, and now the doors of the Bx12 SBS open. The stopwatch is running … Twenty-two people board; about four get off. The doors close; the bus sets off. Total wait time: 23 seconds.

Riding on, you see that traffic is heavy. The Bronx River Parkway and the Hutch are jammed. The Bruckner looks like a diseased artery. But the bus cruises down the bus lane, with only one car (a Lexus with Connecticut plates) even thinking of getting in its way. It is six stops to Pelham Bay Park Station. You arrive in twelve minutes. On a Friday. During rush hour…

…In a way, the bad economy has helped the bus argument. Talk to any transit advocate, and he’ll tell you that buses offer the best return on transit investment—especially in New York, where the Pratt Center estimates that building a forward-looking bus line could cost 200 times less than a subway line.

“If you think about how it costs $4.3 billion to build three stops on the Second Avenue subway line and $2 billion for a one-stop extension of the 7 train, buses are the only direction Walder can go in,” says Gene Russianoff, spokesman for the Straphangers Campaign, an organization mostly seen advocating for subway improvements. In fact, the city’s urban-planning activists are almost all singing buses. “They’re the smartest possible transit investment there is right now,” says Noah Budnick, the deputy director of Transportation Alternatives.

In Auckland we find ourselves in not quite the same dire financial situation, and in fact if our transport minister wasn’t spending billions of dollars on stupid holiday highways we’d certainly have plenty of money over the next decade to massively expand our rail system. However, just as is the case in New York, it is clear that the kind of “superior bus service” that is being offered with the Bx12 SBS – with top quality buses, pre-paid boarding and most importantly extensive bus lanes provides superb “bang for your buck”. Furthermore, it’s fast to implement. Just as New York City is taking years, and spending billions of dollars, to finally progress its Second Avenue Subway, the much needed CBD rail tunnel in Auckland is probably around 10 years away from opening. If we want big public transport gains in the short-term, then our best way to get them is probably through a lot more services like what’s being found in New York City.

Pretty much what I think ARTA are trying to achieve with their b.line idea, but rather than just being a marketing ploy, these buses in New York deliver. That means more bus lanes, the bus lanes operating for longer hours, pre-paid ticketing, better quality of buses and so forth. It does not mean gutting bus lanes along our city’s best current bus route.

Share this