Traffic

What does a highway guy think about priority bus corridors?

by David Alpert   •   December 3, 2008 10:07 am

WMATA believes that the future of Greater Washington's transportation rests on priority bus corridors throughout the region, like the MetroExtra (#79) bus from Silver Spring to downtown DC. With Metrorail running out of capacity by 2030 and serious core expansion costing billions, Metro sees rapid buses as the best chance for a real capacity boost.

Dedicated bus lane around London. Photo by BuhSnarf on Flickr.

Achieving this vision requires cooperation (and funding) from local jurisdictions, to install the new signals and better bus stops, but most importantly to agree to take away a travel lane or on-street parking. By the numbers, it's a no-brainer; a full bus every 10 minutes is transporting as many people in an hour as can park along miles of the corridor; a single bus getting its own lane on a three-lane road is carrying more people than all the cars on several blocks or more of the rest of the lanes.

Still, it's politically difficult to take something away. Single-passenger drivers on a crowded road will see and resent the mostly-empty bus lane, but won't see all the cars that aren't on the road, cutting down on traffic for them. Even if the bus lane lessens traffic delays for every other driver, that's not immediately visible.

According to WMATA, only 1% of traffic on 16th Street is buses, but they carry 30% of the people who travel that corridor. If those 30% drove, traffic would hardly ever move; if another 10% of people rode the buses, it would reduce traffic enormously.

Where do our transportation heads stand on this? Last night, the Coalition for Smarter Growth hosted WMATA General Manager John Catoe, WMATA Board Chair Chris Zimmerman, and Maryland State Highway Administrator Neil Pedersen for a forum on rapid bus service. The big question on everyone's minds was: would Pedersen support this initiative, or cling to an outmoded traffic engineering mindset of focusing on vehicles instead of people?

For a highway guy, Pedersen said some revolutionary things. He believes that our metrics should focus on the total numbers of people we are moving, rather than the total numbers of vehicles. (That makes a bus lane possible.) Such a statement sounds obvious, but there are many transportation engineers who just don't think that way. Pedersen supports attracting more people to transit as a way to make the road system work instead of crashing under heavy traffic. And he supports Smart Growth-type development patterns in "Priority Funding Areas" to build the ridership for good transit.

While Pedersen laid claim to the principle of moving people rather than vehicles as the goal, he shied away from saying he'd be willing to reallocate general travel lanes from mixed traffic to dedicated bus lanes. Instead, he mainly talked about "queue jumpers", where buses can use shoulders near intersections to bypass traffic for short segments around signals, and signal priority, where buses extend the green light. Those are great, but a real dedicated lane, as New York, Portland, London, Bogotà and many other cities have done, will really make buses faster and more attractive to more riders.

Pedersen also made some very pedestrian-friendly statements. He believes that Maryland SHA should design roads for all users, including pedestrians, bikes, and buses as well as the classic cars and trucks. And the transportation system should not, Pedersen agrees, simply focus on movement but also weigh broader goals like economic development and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, Pedersen has previously argued that the sprawl-inducing, VMT-increasing ICC will cut emissions and create economic growth, so those worthy basic principles could, for Pedersen, justify anything from taking away lanes for buses to spending billions on new single-passenger lanes.

Hopefully Maryland will be able to actually build some of these priority corridors. At the moment, it looks like they'll barely be able to even repave any roads for a generation, let alone invest in new infrastructure, thanks to other "providing transportation choices" work we're getting from Pedersen and the SHA.

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