Without capital improvements, Metro can’t provide a consistent travel time on routes, like the one in West Seattle. Two choke points already kill consistency for existing express buses: 1) The Delridge Way onramp to the West Seattle Bridge, with the crossover traffic blocking the dedicated bus lane on the bridge. 2) The Seneca Street exit on the Viaduct, a place where traffic gets bogged down quickly.

If Metro can’t fund the full deal to make BRT effective, why bother? It seems like a boondoggle. Just increase bus hours on existing express bus routes and save the money on repainting buses and making cosmetic changes to certain shelters.

It’s sort of like the changes Sound Transit made to other Metro Express routes, like the 150 or 263. The 545 is just a gussied up version of the 263 with more frequency of service. Why pay more to ride it? Same goes for the bus going between Seattle and Bellevue. Change without significant improvement.

Speaking of Swift and the Aurora Rapid Ride line, I can’t be the only one who thinks this should be an integrated line running from Downtown Seattle to Downtown Everett along SR99. I don’t really care if this becomes a Sound Transit Service or a joint project of Metro, CT, and Everett Transit, I just want seamless operation and payment with full Curitiba style BRT.

The RapidRide bus will not “sit at a long light” when it gets off 15th at Dravus because transit signal priority is part of the RapidRide design. That means the bus will trigger the light so that it can go through and not have to stop.

If you want to learn more about RapidRide so that you can have an informed opinion, check out the Metro website on this

http://metro.kingcounty.gov/up/sc/plans/2009/012009-burr.html

You can’t roll out a “small segment of each route in operation first, earlier than the rest of the line” because it’s the full package that gives the benefits. The point is the BAT (Business Access Transit) lanes and the signal priority and the buses with 3 doors and the modified stop spacing and the ITS (Intelligent Transportation System). Only doing one or two of those things wouldn’t deliver the full time and convenience benefits and certainly wouldn’t get people on board literally and figuratively. You can’t do these things for only part of a line, it’s a corridor-wide change.
The way they are rolling out BRT in stages is to do it line by line, starting with the A Line in 2010 and ending with the E Line in 2013.

That said, I think the excitement is proportional to the expected improvement of service. In SF, they’re expecting a high-quality BRT implementation that can minimize crush-loading along a busy corridor. Here, I’d like to be excited about Ballard BRT. But since the 15/18 already combine to run every 10 minutes and there’s no indication the city is looking to dedicate a bus lane along 15th, build a median stop at Dravus so the bus doesn’t have to get off 15th and sit at a long light, etc. it doesn’t seem like much of a service upgrade. So there’s not much to be excited about.

I think that people that read this blog aren’t a good representative sample of the population in general. Tell most people that nice busses, that are faster and come more often are coming and generally most of them will be happy.

Daimjin – I have a question for next time you talk to ST or Metro. I want to know how are they looking to restructure metro routes in the rainier valley? With LINK going north/south I think that getting east/west is going to me more of an issue now.

However, I wish some of our politicians would stop parading it like it is a substitute for rail.

actually, i’m left with two questions (the first’s probably rhetorical):

-does anybody… anybody at all, seem to be excited about BRT? all i’ve ever heard is people grouse about it (myself included). isn’t this a bad sign? why are we investing in something that seems destined to be a useless waste of money?

-2010, huh? wouldn’t it make more sense from a project planning perspective to roll out in stages starting with a small segment of each route in operation first, earlier than the rest of the line? the silver line in boston (BRT with some decent capital investment) did that – they had i think three or four segments and they used a small, street-running quick-n-dirty segment as the starter where they worked on the technology and built awareness among users. the silver line was and has been kind of a disaster, but it could have been much worse. while boston talked about the silver line for ages, once the commitment was made i think it was <18 months til the first riders boarded the small first segment. the rest of the line took awhile to build (i'm not sure if it's actually even done or if they're continuing to grow it) but they were able to make improvements (and, if it was anywhere other than boston, they could have saved costs) based on their experiences as they operated it. wouldn't this make more sense for the rapid ride system (get a little one going right away and build and refine?)

a bit of a ramble but 2 kind of interesting things to think about…

It’s great to see the powers that be answering the questions openly and honestly.

It helped Quito, Ecuador revitalize the historic Old Town section of that city. Pretty slick.

If it works in a Third World country, it might actually have a shot at fixing Aurora.

Sims’ big congestion pricing plan will flop if he expects people to embrace taking the bus as a substitute for heavily tolled driving.

Congestion pricing can work in big cities with robust rail systems, as commuters can be assured their commute will be reliable, and won’t take any longer. Quality of ride is important, too.

But when people are supposedly going to be forced out of their cars for a bus stuck in traffic…good luck!

From what I can tell, Sims and his Sierra Club friends are taking their cues from this disingenuous group

http://www.gobrt.org/TransportInnovator JanFeb2008.pdf

Disingenuous because they refuse to even acknowlege the important role rail plays in the “model cities” they perpetually write about…GoBRT is funded by Toyota and the Fuel Cell industry. Rubber tires, pavement and internal combustion engines forever!

One contradiction is the trip time reduction. At the open house they told me the RR would save 2-3 minutes over the 54 express–nowhere near “25% or more”.

The other inconsistency is that at that open house the off-bus payment was implied to be a definite part of the plan.

Good! It is a terrible misjudgement to get rid of the regular 54, it’s such a huge link to the California corridor heading south.