Alan Tobey's commentary on the BRT combined service proposal

Our esteemed fellow FBRT member, Alan Tobey, published an excellent commentary on BRT in the July 17 issue of the Daily Planet. It explains how the proposed combined service option, now favored by AC Transit and leaders from the three BRT cities, will work. To read the commentary click here.

False Claims in Measure KK Ballot Argument

I have this opinion piece in the current Daily Planet:

False Claims In Anti-Transit Initiative Ballot Argument

The city clerk has published the ballot arguments for Measure KK, the anti-transit initiative, and anyone who is familiar with the issues can see that the measure’s backers have filled their ballot argument with false claims.

Measure KK backers claim that AC Transit’s Bus Rapid Transit project would eliminate local bus stops.

In fact, AC Transit is considering two alternatives plans and has not decided which to implement. Separate service, with local buses running in the mixed traffic lanes, would certainly not eliminate any local bus stops. Combined service, with local buses running in the dedicated BRT lanes, could conceivably eliminate some local bus stops, but the final decision on location of bus stops in would depend on input from the Berkeley Planning Commission and City Council. We will not know how BRT affects local bus stops until we see the final environmental impact report (EIR).

Measure KK backers claim that most parking would be removed along the route.

In fact, AC Transit has promised to replace parking removed in all locations where there is a shortage of parking. A shortage is defined as a vacancy rate of less than 15 percent for off-street parking; planners agree that, when the vacancy rate is higher than this, it is easy to find on-street parking. We will not know how AC Transit plans to replace parking until we see the final EIR.

Measure KK backers claim that travel time saved by BRT will be insignificant.

In fact, the average bus trip in the corridor will be 15 percent to 30 percent faster than it is now. AC Transit is currently calculating the total net time savings for all transportation in the corridor, and it is expected to be large. This figure will also be in the final EIR.

Measure KK backers claim that energy savings will be insignificant and that BRT is not “green.”

In fact, BRT will save enough energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over six million pounds per year. The draft EIR was written at a time when the law did not yet require EIRs to study greenhouse gas reductions. Because the law has changed, the final EIR will contain these figures.

All of the backers’ ballot arguments are based on the draft EIR. They apparently do not realize that a draft EIR is a first draft, as its name implies. Projects are changed based on public comments on the draft EIR, and we will not know what the actual BRT project is until we see the final EIR. Berkeley’s Planning Commission has not even developed the city’s input on the draft EIR yet, and we do not know what routes they will support or what mitigations they will want.

Measure KK backers are telling us to make the decision about BRT before we have all the facts.

Most absurd, Measure KK backers claim that their initiative will not be costly, as the city attorney’s analysis says. They say: “leave our streets alone—and this measure will cost zero.”

In other words, they say that we should do nothing to build environmentally sound transportation—never implement light rail in Berkeley, and never implement BRT in Berkeley, even though these are the most cost-effective ways of improving public transportation.

Their arguments focus narrow mindedly on AC Transit’s current proposal for BRT. They do not seem to realize that, if their initiative passed, it would be in effect for the indefinite future. It would apply to light rail as well as to BRT. It would apply to every street in Berkeley.

It would mean long delays and large added costs for any light rail or BRT project proposed in Berkeley, which could kill these projects. This would be a major obstacle to Berkeley’s attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the key environmental issue in the 21st century.

Measure KK backers are very good at shooting from the hip.

They are shooting from the hip by basing all their arguments on the draft EIR for AC Transit’s current BRT project, saying that we should reject the project before we even see the final EIR and know what its final design is.

They are shooting from the hip by thinking only of the current project and not realizing that their initiative would be an obstacle to all future light-rail or BRT projects in Berkeley.

I think they will learn that, when you shoot from the hip, you are likely to end up shooting yourself in the foot.

Bus Rapid Transit Will Provide Far Better Service Than Rapid Bus Plus

Roy Nakadegawa asked me to post this.

Bus Rapid Transit Will Provide Far Better Service Than Rapid Bus Plus
by Roy Nakadegawa P.E.

Weekly one reads of environmental and climatic devastations attribute to the increase of Greenhouse gases. For our Region half of our GHGemissions is attributed to transportation. We emit the greatest amount of GHG on a per capita basis than any country because of our great use of the auto. As a responsible world citizen shouldn’t we reduce the emissions from autos and consider building more walkable communities and using public transit?

Berkeley a well known progressive city has an opportunity to consider the development of a faster, reliable and convenient transit systemcalled Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) that will compete favorably to the auto. But there is resistance from a group called “Berkeleyans For BetterTransportation Options (BBTOP)”

BBTOP has proposed a plan they call Rapid Bus Plus (RB+) in lieu of BRT. Their proposal would add some features of BRT, which BBTOP claim would work almost as well without BRT’s dedicated bus lanes.

Researching their plan, it appears it will not provide any significant improvement over the current 1R Rapid Bus (1R).

BBTOP plan’s major addition to current 1R bus in time saving is the use Proof of Payment (POP), which saves time because riders will nothave to take time to pay fares when they enter the bus.

Studies indicate that POP will decrease the dwell time roughly 2-2.5 seconds per passenger when groups of five or more board at a stop. It isestimated around 7,300 daily trips are made on 1R within Berkeley. About 12% of these trips will be during peak hour or 875 boardings. Ifthe buses operate at 4-minute intervals (15 buses per hour), each bus will carry an average 59 riders per bus. With POP and 59 boardings, triptime saving with would be about 2.1 minutes per bus during peak hour.

However, for the handicapped in Portland, they deploy the ramp/lift 0.07% of their total trips and estimated that each boarding cycle takesan average of 81 seconds. The percent of riders using the ramp/lift is greater in Berkeley than in Portland, because Berkeley has long historyfor accommodating handicapped people and have attracted a greater users. Using the slightly higher number of 0.08% of ramp/lift users for Berkeley, with 875 boardings during a peak hour involves 7.0 handicapped boardings per hour. Spreading this among the 15 buses, the average will be 0.47 handicapped boarding per bus, or an average delay of 38 seconds for each bus.

With curbside boarding, the buses also need to maneuver out and back into traffic, adding an average delay of 4 seconds per stop. With 5 stops in Berkeley the delay will be 20 seconds for each bus.

Because of these two delays, the time saving from POP will be reduced to about 1 minutes per bus.

But, there is another current problem where the 1R frequently operates off schedule that RB+ does not address. Even during off peak the 1R carrying less passengers one sees the 1R buses often enter Berkeley in tandem or just a minute apart.

One of the most successful rapid bus line, Wilshire/Whittier Metro Rapid Bus in L.A. combined with their local bus handles 90,000 trips per day. It has experienced deteriorating irregular service due to increased Traffic, so they have now applied for funds to convert 7 miles of this line to operate as BRT.

Since, RB+ with POP will not prevent buses from being stuck in traffic to save about 1 minutes per bus, as calculated above, this time savings will decrease as well as its reliability as traffic increases.

In the near future, Berkeley’s traffic will increase far more than what we ever experienced for Berkeley will build 2,500 living units in the downtown area while the University will build major attractions and offices, plus there are plans for a large hotel with meeting facilities, all which will attract additional offices, businesses, jobs and people.

For improved transit, the BRT with dedicated lanes will have raised platforms to allow level boarding for the disabled with buses equipped with guided docking that assures a narrows gap that allows boarding similar to BART. This eliminates the delay to use of ramp/lift and there will be no delay for buses to merge into traffic, so its total time saving would clearly be three times greater than RB+ and provide greater reliability.

With BRT, the handicapped would have more immediate and greater access than access to BART stations for it would eliminate the need to use the time consuming elevators before and after using BART.

BRT buses will not have to maneuver through traffic and will be able to take maximum advantage of signal priority because buses will not be backed up behind other vehicles at intersections, as the 1R or the RB+ will be. BRT buses will by-pass the queued cars.

In summary, as traffic increases BRT will be far superior to BBTOP’s RB+ proposal. BRT will take full advantage of POP, provide EASY boarding for all with increased reliability and convenience and its time saving will increase more than three times over that of RB+ deteriorating one minute. For these reasons, the BRT with will reduce GHG, provide a good transit alternative that attracts more transit users, similar what BART has experienced with growing congestion and increasing cost of fuel.

BRT In Streetswiki

Streetswiki is a collaborative resource focusing on alternative transportation and livable streets. Their entry on bus rapid transit is at http://www.livablestreets.com/streetswiki/bus-rapid-transit.

Learning from Lerner MetropolisMag.com 6/29/2008

URBAN JOURNAL
Learning from Lerner
The former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil is carrying his message of sustainability to the world’s burgeoning cities. Lesson one: get rid of your car.

By David Sokol
Posted May 29, 2008
Next year marks the 35th anniversary of a simple but transformative idea in urban planning and transportation: Curitiba, Brazil launched a surface bus system that behaves like a subway. Better than, in some ways. Double-articulated vehicles carry large volumes of commuters, passengers prepay their fare in glazed boarding tubes, designated lanes keep traffic flowing smoothly, and one bus trails the next by one minutes’ distance. Curitiba’s transit system was established with little municipal investment and at a fraction of the cost of subterranean excavation, and today it carries some 2 million people per day.

Jaime Lerner was serving his first term as mayor of Curitiba when the city’s bus system began service, and the innovation catapulted the then-37-year-old architect and urban planner not only to two more terms as mayor and another two as governor of Parana State, but also to the forefront of contemporary urban planning and of the nascent sustainability movement. (Indeed, besides public transportation, Lerner implemented a recycling program in Curitiba that still enjoys an impressive participation rate.) Lerner has deftly juggled his design and political careers, and since 2003 he has run an eponymous architecture firm from Curitiba. I caught up with Lerner on a typical whirlwind day—between charming a group of Filipino researchers and making a presentation to a delegation from the United Nations—to clarify points he made at Tropical Green, a February 2006 conference sponsored by Metropolis, and to take his pulse on recent phenomena like boomtown China.

In many respects, the world has caught up to your common-sense approach to sustainability. What events inspired you to embrace those values so early on?
It was logic. We realized that sustainability is a whole discussion. Most people think that sustainability is just green buildings. That’s very important, but it’s not enough. Or that sustainability is new materials, new sources of energy, or recycling, but that’s enough, either. When you see that cities are responsible for 75 percent of all carbon emissions, then it’s in cities where we can find a more effective answer. It’s at the very conception of cities where we have to do this work.

What is a more ideal plan for battling climate change at an urban scale?
One step is to use your car less. Cities will have to provide an alternative public transit. The second is separating garbage, because you can save a lot of energy, even your own. The third is to live closer to work, or to work closer to home. And this is the key issue, because our cities have more and more separation.

Those steps don’t seem too difficult. What about the famous Curitiba bus system: That, too, sounds painless to realize. Has it been adopted widely?
At the moment there are 82 cities around the world. Some of them did it differently, but more or less, it’s Curitiba. I don’t try to prove which system is the best; I know it’s okay to have buses or subways or light rail, as long as the system is a good system. The key issue is to never compete in the same space. They have to be complementary.

Without ranking them, then, what cities have embraced this bus concept particularly well?
They’re not all done, but they include Seoul, Bogotá, Mexico City, the Los Angeles orange line, and many Chinese cities. Even cities that have complete subways, like London and Paris, are also thinking of having a good surface system.

We cannot be dependent on the car. I’ve repeated this saying many times, but I feel it is very appropriate: The car is like our mother in-law. We have a good relationship with her, but we cannot let her conduct our lives. In other words, if the only woman in your life is your mother in-law, then you have a problem.

You mentioned the conception of cities, and now is a time when those births are taking place around the globe. What is your perspective of the new cities coming up throughout the Middle East, India, Korea, and China?
Why are European cities better than most American cities? Because they have mixed uses and mixed incomes. These cities are more human, more diverse. Most of the new cities in Asia and the Middle East are building ghettos for very rich people and ghettos for very poor people. This is not a good coexistence; it’s really terrible, in fact. Some people living in cities are so crazy about their safety and protection that they can barely leave the house without thinking criminals are after them. They are the real prisoners.

You have speaking engagements in the U.S. frequently—such as the Sarasota Design Conference, which is coming up on June 6.
When I go to a city, I try to give testimony about what we did in Curitiba, to show that it’s possible.

Do you tailor your message to the peculiarities of American audiences?
No, everyone understands. Even in Oklahoma City there are people who understand the message. People are starting to understand cities’ quality of life, about why we have to have a mix of uses and good public transport. Of course the message has different meanings in different cities, but the basic idea is that we don’t need to do what we’ve been doing. There has to be a change.

At Tropical Green, you mentioned that you are performing “fast acupuncture” on cities all over the world.
In many cities there are a few focal points that can effect a really great change, points that are not part of the whole planning process, but that can give a new energy to the city. It’s like acupuncture. Planning takes time, but sometimes you have to offer ideas that accomplish it immediately.

Can you give some examples of this?
Where do you live?

In New York.
One great acupuncture in New York is that some places have been transformed by cultural decisions, like Chelsea, Soho, or Williamsburg. They are not related to a global plan, but they will help the whole process of city planning and energize it.

In Paris, I.M. Pei’s Louvre pyramids are a wonderful example of acupuncture. With one gesture he provided the solution to a 300-year-old problem about entering and organizing the museum. So that’s what I like to do recently: go to some place, work with people for a week, propose one or two ideas, and if they like, they can make it happen.

Would you say it’s important for there to be architects and urban planners in elected positions in order to foster experimentation within cities?
Not necessarily. The most important element is having good decision-making and a good equation of co-responsibility. And any mayor, architect or not, has to be open to new ideas. I work with governments and private initiatives—as long as they are interested in improving the quality of their city, then I’m there.

Would you say that Curitiba has problems today that you could not have foreseen 35 years ago?
Every city has new problems every moment, and every mayor has a new challenge. The good thing about Curitiba is that the people are used to innovation and demand it from every mayor.

* * *

Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3390

BRT and BART Redux

In response to the previous post about BRT and BART, Rob Wrenn sends me the following:

The fact that 25,000 people a day have used buses on the corridorshould be evidence enough that BART can't serve everyone's needs, but if more evidence on why BART doesn't fully serve the BRT corridor is needed, consider this info on BART station spacing:

From Wikipedia, BART, distance between stations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit
BART: 104 miles, 43 stations (1 under construction).
Do the math: 1 station every 2.4 miles.

By contrast, the Paris Metro, with, according to Wikipedia, the mostc losely spaced metro stations in the world:382 stops, 298 stations (some stations serve more than one line), 133 miles.So almost 3 stops per mile in Paris compared to one stop every 2.4 miles for BART

For specific distances between BART stations along the proposed BRT route, I looked at a map and measured:

Downtown Berkeley to Ashby: about 1.2 miles, 18 1/2 blocks
Ashby to MacArthur, 1.75 miles, 28 1/2 blocks
MacArthur to 19th St, 1.5 miles, 26 1/2 blocks
19th to 12th Street, .35 miles, 7 blocks
12th to Lake Merritt, .65 miles
Lake Merritt to Fruitvale: about 2.75 miles
Fruitvale to Coliseum: 2.1 miles
Coliseum to San Leandro: 2.9 miles
San Leandro to Bayfair: 2.45

I live about the same distance from Ashby BART and Downtown Berkeley BART (somewhat closer to Ashby). I walk at a fairly brisk pace and it takes me about 15 minutes walk to get to Ashby BART (I think it would take my wife 5 minutes longer at her normal pace). It works out to be 9 blocks or 8 tenths of a mile, and you have to wait for traffic signals to cross some streets such as Ashby. Many people just won't walk that far or take that much time to get to a public transit stop.

I live only two blocks from Telegraph and the proposed BRT corridor. People who won't walk nine blocks like I do, might walk two, three, four blocks to Telegraph to get a bus to downtown Oakland (or Pill Hill or downtown Berkeley) if the service is reliable and reasonably rapid.

The distance between Ashby and MacArthur or MacArthur and 19th is even greater than that between downtown Berkeley and Ashby, so BART effectively serves even fewer people living on either side of Telegraph south of Ashby station along the BRT route (especially if they live east of Telegraph and thus farther from BART) .

And for people south of Oakland, the station spacing is much greater still. Lots of people living within 4 or 5 blocks of East 14th or International Blvd would have to walk 30, 40 minutes or more to get to a BART station.

There's a reason why the buses on the proposed corridor already carry a lot of people. BART, despite claims of BRT opponents, is clearly inconvenient for many people along E. 14th and International Blvd. BART does a good job of serving people whose trip origin and destination are both within a few blocks of a BART, but given the wide spacing of BART stations, there are clearly lots of people whose trip origin and/or destination are too far from a BART station for BART to be useful.

BRT And BART

Some opponents of AC Transit's BRT proposal have claimed that it is not needed because it parallels BART. Actually, BRT and BART will appeal to totally different markets, because they will be used for different types of trips. AC Transit just made this clear by issuing the following Question and Answer:

1. Why build BRT? Doesn't it just parallel BART?

The BRT route parallels BART in some locations-as do other bus routes. East Bay geography and the existing layout of major roadways contribute to this fact. Long streets converge in major origin-destination areas like downtown Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro.

However, the East Bay BRT Project and BART largely serves very different types of trips. Whereas BART has one and one-half to two miles or more between stations (outside of downtown business districts), BRT will have stations every one-third to at most one- half miles. Unlike BART, station access will be almost entirely by walking and by transferring from other bus routes. Most trips on BRT will be local, relatively short, and to desirable areas near BRT.

This is how the current service in the corridor, the 1R Rapid, operates. BRT is intended to make transit travel faster, more reliable and more attractive. Increasing congestion is causing bus delays and unreliable travel times. Dedicated lanes, prominent stations with convenient boarding of buses will attract more riders. Because buses would be operating in a lighter traffic lane, operating costs per passenger are also projected to decrease. More people will use all forms of transit-BRT, BART and other buses combined.

The 2005 regional profile of commuters produced by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission stated that 67% of people still drive alone to work. Transit carried only 13%. BRT gives residents another option for their travel needs, and it will help to reduce the number of folks who commute by car.