Bogotá is upgrading three of its high-quality TransMilenio BRT lines to an elevated metro line. (TheB1M) It’s expected to open in 2028, with 1 million daily passengers. Here’s a map:

Source: Maximilian Dörrbecker.

The metro line will follow the light blue, dark blue, and green lines from the western edge to the northeast edge. A second line was announced in 2020. The video compares the tradeoffs between surface, trenched, cut-and-cover, tunnel, and elevated technologies.

More videos after the fold.

The amazing comeback of Los Angeles. (Climate and Transit)

Bedtime story: “The Man on the Train” by Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1914, read by Christopher Fitton. (Sleep Cove) A nervous 75-year-old grandmother rides “on the cars” for the first time, and meets an interesting fellow passenger.

This is an open thread.

20 Replies to “Sunday Movies: Upgrading BRT to Rail”

  1. One of my favorite local YT channels that helps me to want to drive less.

    SeattleTrafficCams ! Its most recent crash compilation video – Crashes caught on Seattle traffic cameras #10!

    The public transit-lated crashes in the video:
    A car turning left in front of a Link train in the Rainier Valley
    A car crashing into a Lake City bus shelter where people had just been waiting.
    A car in Belltown pulling out of a parking space and into a bus.

    https://youtu.be/5DDCGYWEpeQ

    2. Thanks Sam. Crazy stuff. Most of the incidents happen at night (when I dislike driving in general). There are a lot of idiots out there (some of them I assume are drunk).

  2. I was curious what the rent range is for Link station-area, newer, market rate apts. Add to the list if you like. I thought the rent range differences would be bigger from city to city. This is what I found …

    – Shoreline North. Kinect. $1597 – $3779.
    – Shoreline South. The Line. $1595 – $3060.
    – BelRed. Ondina. $1895 – $3200.
    – Marymoor Village. Spectra. $1793 – $4400.
    – Overlake Village. Avalon Esterra Park. $2040 – $4210.
    – Columbia City. Cityline. $1829 – $3270.

    1. Whenever I’ve looked at the apartment prices in Capitol Hill compared to lower-cost areas like Greenwood or Lynnwood, the difference has only been around $200 per month. Maybe $400 at the most. So I think, is it worth $200-250 to have much more transit and walkable destinations and fellow pedestrians and no large parking lots? And it always has been so far. Of course, if you can’t afford the difference, you have no choice.

      Central Seattle rents grew the fastest and highest in the 2010s compared to elsewhere except downtown Bellevue and the Spring District, so they seem to have reached a ceiling, and now other areas are increasing faster and catching up.

      Can you get rents at Mountlake Terrace, Lynnwood around 200th Street west of the station, and Ash Way P&R? That may tell us something interesting.

      1. – Mountlake Terrace. Terrace Station. $1652 – $2186.
        – Lynnwood City Center. Kinect @ Lynnwood. $1695 – $2695.
        – Ash Way P&R. Urban Center. $1638 – $2259.

        Again, these are all newer, large apartment buildings, very near a Link station, and in one case, a P&R. Of course people can find cheaper rents than this.

      3. I read the entire state is above $1200, so that gives around $400 leeway for the cheapest Lynnwood apartment.

    2. It’s hard to tell how much of an extra premium being very close to Link is from these data. Maybe compare them to new apartments a mile or two away?

      Many places also charge extra for parking — on top of the base rent.

      1. I’m sure there is a premium from them being new, and having modern bldg amenities. And I’m sure there is a certain premium being next to a Link station. How much of one, I’m not sure.

    3. Some of the parking space rents I found online:

      Kinect = $150
      The Line = $175
      Ondina = $100-$300
      Spectra = $135-$175 (negotiated)
      Esterra Park = $75
      Cityline = $200

      1. They didn’t say market-rate TOD would be affordable. They said a reserved subset of subsidized units would be affordable.

        The way to make market-rate units affordable is to go back to 2003 and loosen the zoning restrictions so that housing could have keep up with the population and job growth during the 2000s and 2010s. Seattle lost population in the 1960s and 70s with white flight and the Boeing Bust, going down from 550,000 to 412,000. That meant when I started looking for apartments in 1989, rents were low and there was still a lot of slack in the market. 2 BRs in the northern U-District were $450. The vacancy rate was in the 5-10% stable area, it took six weeks to find a new tenant, and houses remained on the market for six months. So you could look at an apartment, take a week to decide, and it was probably still available.

        Rent increases remained at the inflation rate through the 1990s up to around 2003. That’s when Seattle finally reached its previous 550,000 population peak again. The population started increasing faster but housing didn’t keep up, so rents started rising 5-7% while inflation was 2% or below. All those restrictions on middle housing, too-small urban villages, microapartments (the evolution of SRO hotels, which were closed in the 1970s), and nimby design review delaying or blocking projects, conspired to create a housing shortage and rapidly-rising rents.

        In the 2008 crash it reversed, and many recent arrivals moved back to where they came from. Every other building in the Summit neighborhood had a “For Rent” sign. So “one free month”, “10% off rent”, “free microwave” deals proliferated, which is the first step toward rent decreases. I got my current place in 2010 with one of those “10% off” deals.

        The Amazon boom built up over 2011 and 2012, and by 2013 the last remaining slack from the 1960s loss was squeezed out. Tired old affordable 1 BRs at $650 jumped to over $1,000 and displaced people. Overall rent increases went as high as 10-15% year after year from 2013 to 2018, twice as high as they’d been in the 2000s and while inflation was still 2% or below. My apartment went from $1175 to $1900 between 2010 and 2018. That was typical throughout Seattle: rents went up 45% in just six years. The vacancy rate went down to 1-2%, so landlords had a stranglehold leverage. Take the unit at the jacked-up price the first day it’s available or it will be gone. At the height of the population growth, Seattle was building only 9 units for every 12 jobs added. Population growth started slowing down again in 2018, though still robust.

        In 2020 there was a moratorium on rent increases for the pandemic. It was lifted in 2022, and since then central Seattle has had only modest increases. I think that’s because they rose so far in the 2010s they reached a natural ceiling, and now the lower-cost areas are increasing faster and catching up, especially South King County, Shohomish County, and Pierce County.

        So the last time market-rate rents in Seattle were generally affordable was 2002. The last bargain-basement deals died out in 2013. Since them, market rate has become increasingly unaffordable for lower-level workers. You can’t reverse twenty years of unaffordability curve with just a handful of 1000-unit buildings next to Link stations. Saying that urbanists “promised” they would be affordable is misleading. The only affordable units there are the subsidized ones.

        The market-rate solution is to relax zoning so that more types of units can be built over a larger area, and so that more people can live within walking distance of Link stations or enhanced bus lines. That would dilute the pressure on the existing available units, which would dilute the upward price pressure. That would at least slow down rent increases, so that they’d get less affordable more slowly and people could catch up. Long-term it could even stop the increases beyond inflation, or lead to temporary gluts that lower rents. That’s the way to regain people’s purchasing power so that they’re not spending so much of their income on rent above the 30% standard, or living twenty miles away from where they want to in in car-dependent hardship order to find something they can afford.

  3. Bogota is upgrading their BRT to a metro. It reminds me of Mexico City which also has a metro for their core network and BRT and trolley lines in between. Both use gondolas as feeders to their metro and BRT stations. In Bogota it is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMiCable line which shows as the T Line on the bottom left of the map. It connects one of the neighborhoods up some steep hills.

  4. That video was really hard to watch. The editors got way too carried away with the fast cutting. What is the point? It is not a horror movie. Are you trying to “spice up” something the readers might otherwise find boring? That is insulting. It is what MTV did it back in the day. They designed it for their key audience — those with short attention spans. It is too bad because there is some good video in there and a bit of worthwhile information (even if they ignored some important facts about Bogota like the enormous growth of the city*). If they weren’t so heavy handed with the fast cuts it would be a decent video.

    The authors glossed over TransMilenio as well as the larger public transport system. They suggested that everything would be solved once they built a metro. TransMilenio carries about 2 and a half million riders a day so while a new metro carrying a million is certainly impressive it doesn’t replace TransMilenio. Nor is TransMilenio (the BRT) all of the bus service in Bogota. If you zoom in close enough on Google maps to see the various bus stops it isn’t obvious what is the BRT and what isn’t (https://maps.app.goo.gl/9tDjbckpyz1TAdkJA). Clearly there is coverage everywhere. If you flip to aerial view you can see there is density pretty much everywhere as well. The new metro is definitely worth building and it will definitely improve things but it is no panacea. It is unrealistic to expect a city like Bogota to transform itself to a city where most trips are taken by rail anytime soon (despite the really high density). One nice thing about building rail (that carries a million people a day) is that it frees up the buses to run more often (in non-BRT areas). But the hard work (of making sure those buses aren’t stuck in traffic and run frequently) still has to be done.

    *The growth of the city is quite something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogot%C3%A1#Demographics. In fifty years it went from 325,000 to over four million. It has added another three million since then.

    1. can’t beat it (apt) door to (transit) door! Not even an elevator! (besides one the one in the building)

  6. The natural progression as density increases…except in Seattle, where big business gets their own light rail despite the density (Boeing/Everett is the most notable).

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