Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Transoeste BRT in Rio de Janeiro. Photo by Michael Oko.

There’s a new global benchmark for rating bus rapid transit projects. Yesterday the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy released the BRT Standard 2013, which lays out the requirements for bus routes to qualify as BRT and scores 50 systems in 35 cities around the world as basic, bronze, silver, or gold based on various criteria. The idea, which ITDP has been refining since a beta release in 2011, is to provide a concrete definition of what BRT is, and a reference for politicians, planners, and advocates who are interested in creating new BRT routes, as well as to rate the quality of existing systems.

ITDP CEO Walter Hook. Photo by Colin Hughes.

The standard rates more than 30 aspects of bus corridor design, awarding points for elements that improve system performance. Dedicated bus lanes, level boarding, pre-paid boarding and signal prioritization are considered basic requirements for BRT. Additional elements that score points include multiple bus routes running on the same corridor; passing lanes at stations; low-emission buses; attractive, weather-protected stations; real-time arrival info signs; integration with bike sharing and more.

Streetsblog recently caught up with ITDP CEO Walter Hook via telephone to get more info on the new guide.

John Greenfield: Congratulations on releasing the BRT Standard. So this is kind of like the LEED [green building rating system] for bus rapid transit, correct?

Walter Hook: Yeah, that’s basically the idea, with the additional caveat that the BRT Standard is also positing a minimum definition for what constitutes BRT at all, which is not really an element in LEED. I mean, LEED doesn’t say, “You’re not a green building if you don’t hit any of these things.” The BRT Standard now has a minimum definition. That’s new from last time.

When the U.S. promoted BRT they didn’t promote it with a very clear definition. So a lot of mediocre bus improvements were implemented that tarnished the brand.

JG: What is your minimum standard for something to be called BRT?

WH: It’s a fairly complicated formula but essentially it has to have a dedicated lane of at least four kilometers. If it’s on a two-way road, it has to run along the central median. If it’s a curb-running bus lane on a two-way street it’s pretty much ineligible. So there are a couple of baseline things, but there are a lot of details and nuances.

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The four sparsely populated mountain counties make up the Roaring Fork Valley extend over roughly 50 miles on Colorado’s Western Slope. About 32,000 people are interspersed throughout the valley in small towns like Basalt, Carbondale, and Glenwood Springs, but the local economy revolves around the nearby resort town of Aspen.

Smart branding is important for rural transit systems, says Smart Growth America's Roger Millar.

This, clearly, is challenging terrain for a transit agency. Aspen’s hotels and restaurants attract workers from around the region, but people who toil in local service industry jobs have mostly been priced out of the housing near Aspen.

“People who wash pots and pans at the hotels in Aspen were driving 75 miles one way for the privilege of doing that,” said Roger Millar of Smart Growth America at the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference in Kansas City last week.

As a result, Highway 82, the main route into Aspen, is the most congested highway in Colorado. Between 1992 and 1994, the Colorado DOT widened Highway 82 to four lanes.

“The DOT said by the time we get finished building four lanes, we’re going to need six lanes,” Millar said. “And everyone [in town] said, enough with that, we’ve got to do something different.”

Now the Roaring Fork Transit Authority is constructing the agreed upon alternative: a 39-mile bus rapid transit system along Highway 82 that they plan to call, in a bit of marketing genius, the VelociRFTA. When it opens this September, it will be the first bus rapid transit system in the country to serve a rural area.

The $40 million project will run buses every 10 minutes at rush hour, stopping nine times along the lengthy journey — a commuter express route. It will also feature heated waiting stations with bathrooms (pictured above). RFTA officials are encouraging users to walk or bike to the stations.

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The vast majority of cities implementing bus improvements with federal BRT dollars have seen ridership increases -- some of them quite dramatic. Image: GAO

How substantial are the benefits delivered by federal investment in bus rapid transit projects, and how can the feds help local governments build better bus improvements? A new report from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office [PDF] looks at the results of BRT projects that have been completed in 20 cities since 2005, when SAFETEA-LU expanded federal funding eligibility for such projects. The GAO found that almost all of the projects have proven successful as cost-effective upgrades to increase ridership, but it also identified a few ways that federal policy provides incentives for local governments to avoid building bus projects that meet the standards for high-quality BRT.

Ridership is up on 13 of the 15 routes that were completed in time to furnish data for the study. (On the other two routes — both in Los Angeles — local officials claim the BRT projects have still led to increased ridership on local bus routes.) In many cases, ridership increased by more than 30 percent in the first year, and five projects saw ridership jump between 60 and 80 percent. These are people who would not have taken transit if not coaxed aboard by these federally-funded improvements, including peak travel time savings ranging from 10 to 30 percent.

Still, few of these projects meet the standard for “true BRT” developed by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. Since bus rapid transit consists of a menu of possible improvements — such as off-board fare collection, dedicated bus lanes, and platform-level boarding — local governments often end up calling a project “BRT” when it’s really just a smattering of different upgrades. And the GAO report bears this out, finding that all 20 routes took the menu of BRT features as mere suggestions, often incorporating just a few of them. Some of the more significant ones – with the most power to cut travel times and increase ridership – were also the most expensive, and therefore the least used.

Only three of the 20 bus routes run on a dedicated lane for at least 30 percent of their length. Two more run on a “semi-dedicated” lane at least 30 percent of the time. A dedicated lane can allow buses to speed past bumper-to-bumper traffic, but most of the routes the GAO studied operate primarily in mixed traffic on arterial streets. With capital costs averaging $50,000 to $100,000 per mile in mixed traffic — compared to $2 to $10 million per mile for projects that have dedicated lanes – it’s understandable why so many communities have opted to keep it cheap. And in some cases, such as Kansas City, congestion is low enough that a dedicated lane would be an unnecessary expense.

BRT projects may include separated lanes for buses, platform-level boarding, off-board fare collection, signal priority at intersections, and real-time arrival information, but no U.S. system takes advantage of all those features. Image: GAO

Other BRT features — like off-board fare collection, low-floor buses that speed boarding, and technological improvements like transit-priority signal timing – were more widely adopted. One of the GAO’s interesting contributions is its explanation of why agencies opt for certain BRT upgrades but not others. Incentives to skimp on bus projects may actually be baked into federal funding formulas.

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With impressive urgency, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has spent his first months in office retooling and reconfiguring how the “City That Works” works. Emanuel’s energy is evident in changes from beat-cop deployment to the push for a longer school day, but perhaps the mayor’s most tangible efforts can be seen in his ambitious transportation agenda.

With Mayor Rahm Emanuel signaling a commitment to high-performance bus rapid transit, the Chicago-based nonprofit Metropolitan Planning Council envisions a 95-mile BRT network that would carry an additional 71,000 daily riders.

With Chicago DOT Commissioner Gabe Klein at his side, Emanuel has already implemented the city’s first protected bike lanes as part of a plan to add 100 miles of bike lanes within four years, announced a $1 billion upgrade to the Chicago Transit Authority’s Red Line, and passed a $2 “congestion fee” on downtown parking garages that will go towards the creation of a CTA Green Line stop that serves McCormick Place – the nation’s largest convention center – and a downtown circulator bus route being billed as bus rapid transit.

The circulator could be an interesting harbinger of Emanuel’s bus policy and how far he will go with BRT. He has stated that BRT projects in Chicago will include “dedicated bus lanes, signal preemption, pre-paid boarding or on-board fare verification, multiple entry and exit points on the buses, limited stops, and at-grade boarding.” As it’s proposed now — with off-board fare payment and signal priority — the downtown circulator is a step in this direction. But it has yet to be seen whether Chicago will commit to high-performance BRT that sets a precedent for other American cities.

From Boston to Kansas City, U.S. cities tend to implement “BRT-lite,” where the actual benefits fall well short of expectations. Most of this disconnect is due to poor marketing by transit agencies trying to drum up excitement for projects that don’t meet true BRT standards. When the projects deliver less than promised, the reputation of BRT as an effective transit solution suffers.

Chicago has a chance to change this perception and serve as a model for cities nationwide by building a “gold-standard” BRT system, based on the rating system established by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. Budgets may be tight, but as Emanuel is showing with his funding plan for the downtown circulator, he’s not afraid to raise new revenues. And BRT’s lower construction costs relative to rail may make it the most realistic way for Chicago to move ahead on expanding its transit network.

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As disappointing as it’s been to see Detroit’s light rail plans being squashed, it’s been pretty exciting watching what has been taking shape in its place.

Detroit's planned bus rapid transit system would cover 110 miles and three counties. The system is designed to help urban workers reach suburban jobs. Photo: Wall Street Journal

The Motor City’s plans to shift some $500 million from a 9-mile light rail system to bus rapid transit system could go a long way toward remedying the crushing mobility problems experienced by the city’s transit-dependent population. Detroit BRT, the Free Press reports, will cover three counties — serving as a crucial connection to the region’s largely suburbanized job centers.

The new system will cover a total of 110 miles with dedicated lanes. That would make it by far the country’s largest BRT system, says Stephanie Lotshaw, at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. The existing BRT systems in the country are all under 20 miles, she said.

More good news: it could be operating within three to five years.

Ridership estimates, at this point, are uncertain, according to the Wall Street Journal. But the need for better transit options is dire. The paper, this morning, profiled a Detroit janitor who leaves his house five hours before he has to be at work — just to be on the safe side.

“As long as I have a job, I’m good,” he said. “I just need them to run tomorrow so I still have one.”

Without a strong transit system, it was difficult for the city to justify the addition of light rail.

“People are losing jobs because they can’t reach them,” Mayor Bing told the WSJ.

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Two weeks ago, every option for reconstructing the Tappan Zee Bridge posted on the state's project website showed both a bus line and a rail line. Now, all the documents showing transit across the bridge have disappeared. Image: Tappan Zee Bridge website, captured by Streetsblog

Call it the mystery of the missing transit. One of New York state’s biggest transit projects, in the works for nearly a decade, was canceled overnight and no one will explain why, or even claim responsibility for the decision.

Two weeks ago, each of the four alternatives for replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge, which spans the Hudson River north of New York City, connecting the suburban counties of Rockland and Westchester, included a new Metro-North commuter rail line and some form of bus rapid transit. The project called for widening the highway but also included a major expansion of transit in both counties. It was the product of nine years of study and a whopping 280 public meetings. The whole process was thoroughly documented, with information about each alternative — along with hundreds of pages generated by the environmental review process and public commentary — easily found on the state’s Tappan Zee Bridge website.

On October 11, the Federal Highway Administration and Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office announced that the bridge project had been selected for expedited federal review. The project they promised to speed up, however, was vastly different from the one vetted over the course of nearly a decade. The new plan for the bridge promised to add space for car traffic but left the transit component to be completed at an unspecified future date. Transit advocates are skeptical that the commuter rail and BRT lines will ever see the light of day.

At the same time that transit was removed from the plan, the state expunged from the public record all information about the nine-year public process and the four design alternatives that included rail and bus lines. The Tappan Zee website no longer displays the documents it did two weeks ago, as blogger Cap’n Transit first noted. The endorsement of transit, the extensive environmental analysis, the history of public input — all of it gone, replaced by three short documents chronicling the brief history of the transit-free project.

So much for transparency. Kate Slevin, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, said she couldn’t recall a single example of this kind of wholesale document scrubbing.

In addition to hiding the history of the Tappan Zee project, the state and federal agencies in charge won’t disclose how they reached the decision to build the bridge without transit.

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Last month the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy released its report, “Recapturing Global Leadership in Bus Rapid Transit” [PDF], which proposed a LEED-like rating system for bus rapid transit projects and laid out a strategy for American cities to build systems as good as the world’s best BRT. While more than 20 American bus projects have claimed the BRT mantle at various times, the ITDP report named just five American cities with bus corridors that made the grade and earned the title “True BRT.” Streetsblog is pleased to publish a series of case studies from ITDP examining these innovative transit projects. We started with Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and today, we look at Sin City — Las Vegas.

The Strip Express helps make Las Vegas's BRT system one of the country's best. Photo courtesy of ITDP

When you think of Las Vegas, the first thing that pops into your head is efficient transit, right? Well, maybe not the first thing. But according to ITDP’s report, Las Vegas has one of the top five BRT systems in the country.

Las Vegas is one of the few U.S. cities with a whole network of BRT, as opposed to just a single corridor. And while the Strip Downtown Express (SDX) is the most advanced BRT route in the network, the fact that the city is creating a network elevates its status among U.S. BRT systems.

The network presently includes two BRT routes (with another two under construction), along with two express bus routes that incorporate some BRT elements. The network serves both the city and nearby suburbs, and is good news for a metropolitan area that was especially hard hit by the recession.

In a sprawling region where the recession and rising gas prices hit many commuters hard, growing numbers of people are opting for fast, reliable, and affordable bus service. The BRT network, built at a fraction of the cost of other alternatives like light rail or the city’s problem-plagued monorail, also appeals to savvy politicians looking to deliver both quality and value for their constituents.

Las Vegas’s Bus Rapid Transit program began with the Metropolitan Area Express (MAX), which opened in 2004. The MAX offers many standard BRT features including off-board fare collection, special buses, and stations with at-level boarding at most stops. It has 4.5 miles of dedicated lanes (out of a total route of 7.5 miles), which are aligned by the curb and shared with right-turning traffic. The MAX corridor is also shared by the Route 113 buses, which essentially serve as a “local” to the MAX’s more express service.

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Cleveland's HealthLine. Photo courtesy of ITDP.

Last month the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy released its report, “Recapturing Global Leadership in Bus Rapid Transit” [PDF], which proposed a LEED-like rating system for bus rapid transit projects and laid out a strategy for American cities to build systems as good as the world’s best BRT. While more than 20 American bus projects have claimed the BRT mantle at various times, the ITDP report named just five American cities with bus corridors that made the grade and earned the title “True BRT.” Streetsblog is pleased to publish a series of case studies from ITDP examining these innovative transit projects. We started with Pittsburgh and today, we focus on Cleveland.

Cleveland doesn’t often get recognition for being a leader in innovative transportation – but maybe it should. A recent report from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) awarded Cleveland the highest rating of any American BRT system.

Cleveland’s first BRT line opened in 2008. The HealthLine stretches 6.8 miles along Euclid Avenue, connecting the city’s main employment centers, including downtown Cleveland, the Cleveland Clinic, and University Hospital, coming within a half mile of more than 200,000 employees and 58,000 households. In just three years, ridership has increased more than 60 percent over the bus routes that formerly ran along the corridor. This promotional video shows how the HealthLine mimics light rail for a better passenger experience.

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Pittsburgh's East Busway serves 15 bus routes and more than 25,000 riders daily. Photo: ITDP

Last month the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy released its report, “Recapturing Global Leadership in Bus Rapid Transit” [PDF], which proposed a LEED-like rating system for bus rapid transit projects and laid out a strategy for American cities to build systems as good as the world’s best BRT. While more than 20 American bus projects have claimed the BRT mantle at various times, the ITDP report named just five American cities with bus corridors that made the grade and earned the title “True BRT.” Streetsblog is pleased to publish a series of case studies from ITDP examining these innovative transit projects, starting with the country’s first BRT routes, in Pittsburgh.

In recent years, Pittsburgh’s reputation has been rejuvenated. The former industrial hub is becoming an innovative model for urban re-development, and an attractive place to live and work.

Pittsburgh’s leadership on the urban sustainability front is not a recent phenomenon – in fact, it was the first city in the United States to implement elements of bus rapid transit, and it paved the way for more robust U.S. BRT systems.

In 1977, only three years after Curitiba, Brazil implemented the world’s first BRT system, Pittsburgh opened the South Busway, 4.3 miles of exclusive bus lanes, running though previously underserved areas of the city, from the western suburbs to the downtown. The city was concerned about worsening traffic congestion, and, lacking the funds to rehabilitate the city’s streetcar lines, took inspiration from Curitiba and created the South Busway. Funding for the system came from U.S. DOT, the state of Pennsylvania and Allegheny County. The Port Authority of Allegheny County, a county-owned, state-funded agency, operates the system.

The success of the South Busway helped the city leverage funding for the expansion of the network, and in 1983, the Martin Luther King, Jr. East Busway opened. The East Busway began as a 6.8 mile network, with an additional 2.3 miles added in 2003, connecting the eastern suburbs with downtown. Fifteen bus routes run along its corridor. Its current weekday ridership is 25,600, with annual ridership close to 7 million.

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In ITDP's BRT rating system, the SDX route in Las Vegas eked out a bronze-standard rating, one of only five American routes to pass the threshold of "true BRT." Image: ITDP

Attempts by U.S. cities to build Bus Rapid Transit systems tend to get stymied by a Catch-22: Most Americans have no experience riding great BRT, so mustering the political will to build full-fledged systems — and reallocate the necessary street space from cars to buses — is often fiendishly difficult. The results — incremental bus improvements sold to the public as BRT — are too watered down to showcase the full extent to which bus-based systems can attract riders and get people to switch from driving to transit.

In Boston, for instance, bus speeds for one route on the Silver Line Waterfront corridor actually decreased despite the project’s $619 million pricetag. Meanwhile, cities in Latin America, Asia, and Africa are rolling out new, high-capacity BRT systems at a rapid clip, leaving American transit networks behind.

Cities can get away with calling half-measures “BRT” in part because there are no standards in place to define what truly qualifies as BRT. If all it takes is pre-paid boarding and longer spacing between stops, then the term loses meaning. In a new report, “Recapturing Global Leadership in Bus Rapid Transit” [PDF], the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy sets out to fill this void with BRT standards that American cities can shoot for.

ITDP is proposing a scoring system to grade bus-based transit corridors, which would work much like the LEED certification system for green buildings. The authors say their scorecard has yet to be perfected, but it already spits out results that make intuitive sense — like the fact that no U.S. city has ever built a first-rate BRT corridor. While American attempts to build bus rapid transit systems have shaved travel times and attracted new riders to transit, ITDP concludes that every single one has failed to meet the highest standards for BRT design.

“Based on what we’ve seen in our work in cities around the world, we think there’s still more that could be done,” ITDP director Walter Hook said in a statement accompanying the report. “Getting at least one truly world-class BRT system built in the U.S. could inspire cities around the country to rethink the way they use buses in the fight against increasing traffic congestion and rising fuel prices.”

More than 20 American bus projects have claimed the BRT mantle, the authors report, but only five even qualify as true Bus Rapid Transit: Cleveland’s HealthLine, Los Angeles’s Orange Line, Pittsburgh’s East Busway, Eugene’s EmX, and Las Vegas’s SDX. Those corridors all distinguished themselves by running buses in the center of the roadbed and physically separating them from regular traffic — two characteristics that factor heavily in ITDP’s 100-point scale.

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