Metro Jacksonville

I volunteer to bring the chicken feathers...............or maybe duck feathers would be more appropriate?

I've been in Delhi.  It has the most insane traffic in the world.  It is the craziest mix of scooters, tuktuks, cars, bicycles, elephant carts, pedal rickshaws and trucks you have ever seen.  Riding in the back of a taxi I sincerely thought I was going to die and had to cover my eyes so as not to see it coming.

The very idea that BRT could work there HAD to take an alien mind beam.

Every time I read about American BRT proposals, I am drawn to the same exact conclusion ...

They are salivating over the possibility of building dedicated "bus" lanes that can eventually be converted into HOV or express lanes for cars. Period. End of story. Because once you factor in the expenses of dedicated BRT lanes, there's virtually zero cost savings over streetcars or light-rail.

Honestly, I'm not even necessarily opposed to building new HOV or express lanes. Please just pay for them out of your road building budget. You can let buses use the HOV lanes just the same, and it will actually be easier to get money from the Feds to build the lanes as a highway project. Then you can use any mass transit money you have for actual mass transit projects.

QuoteThey are salivating over the possibility of building dedicated "bus" lanes that can eventually be converted into HOV or express lanes for cars.

I agree.  This is the one area where the expense makes sense, assuming the desire is to tap into transit money as an additional road building funding source.  

Btw, here is an article about Cleveland's new Euclid BRT Corridor and it spurring "$4.3 billion in economic development" after opening last two years ago.  It cost about $50/mile to build, which makes the cost comparable to an expensive light rail system.  Anyway, this article is about BRT having the ability to spur just as much private development as rail.

QuoteHealthLine Restores Euclid

As Cleveland’s BRT investment took shape, the once forlorn Euclid Avenue was rediscovered by businesses and institutions located adjacent to it. “Everybody began to see Euclid as their front door rather than their back door and enhanced their face on Euclid because of the project,” said Maribeth Feke, director of planning, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority. The BRT formally opened in October and has been named the HealthLine, through a naming agreement with the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals located at one stop.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer in February 2008 tallied $4.3 billion in development investment being made along the rebuilt Euclid Avenue, encompassing “everything from museums and hospitals to housing and educational institutions.” Land values in one section doubled in the past five years from $200,000 to $400,000 per acre.

Replicating the emerging success of Cleveland’s HealthLine in other cities and towns could be difficult. While the BRT was a key impetus for the redevelopment, there were other factors. In particular, property values on Euclid Avenue had fallen so far that they became all but irresistible to investors, who eyed the redevelopment going on in other urban downtowns around the country.

Also, the City of Cleveland made major non-BRT investments along the avenue. This included a curb-to-curb rebuilding of the street with new water and sewer lines as well as fiber optic cables, new sidewalks, streetlights and landscaping. These investments helped convince developers of the city’s long-term commitment to the avenue. The BRT system itself was designed as a permanent feature of the avenue.

“The stations are in the middle of the street,” Feke said. “They’re pretty substantialâ€"lots of concrete.”

http://www.intransitionmag.org/Winter_2009/BRT_Redevelopment.html

A couple of Euclid images from last Summer
(http://photos.metrojacksonville.com/photos/593548867_NPEz4-M.jpg)

(http://photos.metrojacksonville.com/photos/593549258_Z6heo-M.jpg)

(http://photos.metrojacksonville.com/photos/593549205_9RC5Y-M.jpg)

(http://photos.metrojacksonville.com/photos/593549446_2DhEN-M.jpg)

(http://photos.metrojacksonville.com/photos/593549398_A9dVt-M.jpg)

...and more from New Delhi

Quote
Reddy, steady, won’t go

The Pioneer Edit Desk

BRT is an unmitigated disaster

It was only to be expected that Union Urban Development Minister S Jaipal Reddy would defend the ill-conceived and hugely wasteful Bus Rapid Transport projects in Parliament. Having junketed at the tax payers’ expense to exotic foreign destinations, ostensibly to study their transport systems, and zeroing in on the BRT which is least suited for Indian cities, neither he nor the other politicians and bureaucrats who were sufficiently impressed by the traffic system of Bogota to replicate it here can possibly disown responsibility for adding chaos to the mess that prevails on our streets. Let us also bear in mind that the BRT is not exactly an inexpensive (though ineffectual) makeover of derelict roads â€" politicians and bureaucrats have a certain fondness for projects that cost a lot of public money without actually benefiting the people for whose welfare they are allegedly meant. Since the patrons of such projects cannot cite irrefutable cost-benefit analysis, they invariably â€" and slyly â€" try to stifle any meaningful debate by referring to extraneous and irrelevant issues. Hence Mr Reddy’s caustic comment that the “voices of car owners should not be allowed to distort the debate” and that it is still too early to jump to any conclusion about the feasibility of the system in India. The Minister obviously does not have to drive down the BRT stretch that has been declared ‘operational’ in Delhi; even if he were to travel that way, the police would ensure that he has a hassle-free ride. In any event, he wouldn’t know what the chaos is all about because the tinted glasses of his official car, paid for by the very people whom he so rudely seeks to snub, would shut out images of disorder from his view. No, Minister, it is not car owners who are trying to ‘distort the debate’ â€" there never was a debate on whether BRT is the best option to restore order on the roads; you and your minions in the bureaucracy just pushed it through, regardless of the consequences which have proved to be disastrous.

The real issue is really larger than that of the imposition of BRT on our cities: It is about cheap populism in which politicians indulge with an eye to elections. According to Mr Reddy, “MPs must listen to the demand of common commuters.” What he means is politicians should do things in a short-sighted manner and pander to the lowest common denominator, instead of focusing on long-term interests of the people. What is popular with voters on the eve of elections is not necessarily good for them in the long term. True, this point is often lost on those who clamour for immediate ‘benefits’ or wish to be seen as the focal point of Government policy. For instance, farmers are easily persuaded by promises of free power to draw ground water; it is only when power supply boards go broke or the ground water supply is too depleted to be of any use that the implications of populism begin to sink in. Unfortunately, often it is too late to reverse the damage that has already been inflicted. So, too, with the BRT: Mr Reddy is welcome to his populist rhetoric, but he would be terribly wrong to believe that people lack the intelligence to look through the bunkum that he and other defenders of the BRT have been peddling. Interestingly, although the Minister claims that it is ‘too early to jump to any conclusion about the feasibility of the system in India’, in the same breath he rubbishes the “limited experience of a pilot project”. How else is feasibility tested?

Whatcha Think??


OCKLAWAHA

I was LOL over the description of the BRT's advantages ("like the best of trains"!) while shunning any comparison to buses ("Is that vomit?"  :D ).  Well, if they want something that "rides like a train, quacks like a train, looks like a train", then maybe they should just build a train!  ;D

QuoteTHE TIMES OF INDIA

Delhi bus corridor: Fiasco continues
Megha Suri & Ambika Pandit, TNN, 23 April 2008, 02:39am IST

|
BRT corridor chaos
Autos, cars, two-wheelers plied on the bus lane on Tuesday, but it still didn’t speed up traffic (TOI Photo)
NEW DELHI: The BRT corridor has gone bust. Yes, that's the resounding message from two days of chaotic trials on the Ambedkar Nagar-Moolchand stretch. What else can explain the decision of a panicky government to let in taxis and autos into the corridor dedicated to buses! If the BRT architects are willing to jettison lane segregation, then the corridor - on which about Rs 100 crore has already been spent - is as good as dead. All that remains is for the government to send in crews to dismantle it so that Delhiites can heave a sigh of relief. That would be the rational thing to do.

TOI had at every step warned of such an outcome, going simply by the traffic volume and the reduction of road space for it. Still, people were forced to put up with the whimsical execution of this ill-fated idea by obstinate officials. And now, when its utter failure is staring the government in the face, desperate remedies are being proposed.

An angry CM, Sheila Dikshit, summoned all stakeholders of the project for an emergency meeting on Tuesday morning and asked them to get their act together. Significantly, she said six other BRT corridors being planned in the city would be shelved till her government was satisfied that the pilot project was successful.

As the first firefighting measure, a desperate government decided to allow autos and taxis to ply in the "dedicated" bus lane. When questioned about this step that negated the very concept of BRT, the officials did a U-turn in the evening and said that autos won't be allowed!

It's symptomatic of the band-aid approach to this project now. Paper over the cracks to hold the mess together even as it grows bigger.

By evening, the government was ready with a host of measures which included pulling out Blueline buses from the corridor; opening a cut in the divider near Soami Nagar on Outer Ring Road; redesigning a slip road leading to Chirag Village near the Chirag Dilli crossing; putting up more signages; even asking the traffic police to send their "best men"!

With Dikshit glaring at them, the officials first gave instructions to allow autos and taxis into the bus lane. A senior official said this was the norm in foreign countries too where other traffic was allowed into the bus lanes during off-peak hours. But for now, only taxis will be permitted in the bus lanes. Autos have been barred again as they were obstructing the free flow of buses.

   

QuoteNew Delhi

Sidhartha Roy and Atul Mathur, Hindustan Times
New Delhi , April 24, 2008


As the mercury shot past 40 degrees for the second straight day, the BRT corridor saw its worst traffic jams yet, tying vehicles down for up to 45 minutes at a single signal, and triggering ripples that choked all colony streets on either side of the blocked artery.

Seventy-two hours from the Delhi government’s deadline to fix the chaos or face scrapping of the project, operators of the disastrously conceived idea all but threw up their hands, saying they had underestimated the volume of traffic, and had no magic wand to make it vanish.

A few kilometres away in Lutyens’s Delhi, lawmakers from the left and right were united in a rare jugalbandi as echoes of public fury rang in Parliament for the second day running. In the Lok Sabha, BJP’s VK Malhotra, backed by CPM’s Mohammed Salim, demanded prosecution of those behind the project.

Traffic jams on the corridor were more severe than those seen on Monday and Tuesday. It took Hindustan Times 45 minutes to get past the Chirag Dilli intersection, and only a little less to go past the Archana crossing.

Top officials of DIMTS, the executing agency, told HT anonymously that they had no idea of what they could do to turn things around by the weekend, when their deadline to shape up or ship out runs out.

“We are looking for measures to handle such a massive volume of traffic. We have stopped the movement of light commercial vehicles during peak hours,” Transport Commissioner RK Verma said. “Wherever essential, we are redesigning the intersections for smooth flow of vehicles.”

DIMTS chief SN Sahai said: “Chirag Dilli is the main problem... We are widening the road at Chirag Dilli by taking over some ‘dead space’.”

Sahai admitted, however, that these moves would not make a dramatic difference. “The volume of traffic is just huge. However, discipline is setting in, and the system now needs some time to stabilise,” he said.

For commuters trapped under a merciless sun and, in some cases, in oven-like vehicles, this was no consolation.

“It took me an hour and a half in the afternoon to reach Panchsheel Enclave from Moolchand. I am not taking this road again,” said management consultant Anil Advani.

Quote
Kids bear the brunt of BRT mess
Megha Suri, TNN, 24 April 2008, 03:03am IST

|
BRT fiasco continues

NEW DELHI
: For the past four days, Manoj Raheja, a Chirag Dilli resident, has been starting work only after 2pm.
"The lives of my daughters are more important, even if at the cost of making business suffer. I don’t know what this government was thinking before designing the corridor," he said while waiting for his children’s school bus.

Raheja's daughters study in Summer Fields School and ever since the BRT corridor became operational, the bus driver has refused to come into the colony to drop them. "The bus used to enter Shiekh Sarai from Press Enclave Road and exit from the lane leading on to the corridor via Chirag Village. But buses are not being allowed to exit from that road any longer so the driver drops my kids on the main road," he said.

Like Raheja, many parents are being forced to leave everything else and pick up their children from the BRT stretch in the afternoon. Even as the government does all it can to make the corridor a success, at the receiving end are scores of children whose buses are not being allowed into colonies.

With chaos prevailing on the corridor, parents are wary about leaving the children alone on the road. Sudha Kala, also a resident of Shiekh Sarai,waits at the next intersection at Press Enclave for her four-year-old grandson Pratyush. "We can't leave our kids to die. My son and daughter-in-law are both working and the bus driver has clearly told me that he can't even wait for a second at the bus stop for us to arrive, as it leads to a jam in the bus lane. Since the bus can come any time within a 15-20 minute range, I have to wait here in the sun. The main road is so dangerous that we can't leave the kids unattended at all," said the septuagenarian.

It's even tougher for those living at Madangir and Pushp Vihar. The government is putting up high railings between the bus lanes and MV lanes to prevent people from crossing the road. "My wife now has to walk one km just to pick up our daughter from the next bus stop. The railings have no gap and she is left with no option but to walk all the way till the next bus stop to cross the road," said Ramesh Saini, whose daughter studies in Amity.

Meanwhile, an increasingly desperate city government continued to tinker with the corridor to make it work. The signalling system, which was off on Tuesday, was switched on again on Wednesday. This resulted in more jams - the average travel time on Wednesday was over an hour. Even after the morning peak hour, vehicles had to wait 30 to 35 minutes just to cross an intersection.

Drivers could be seen trying to clamber on to footpaths, while cyclists took to bus lanes as a short cut. Hardly anyone listened to the marshals. Vehicles were taking five to six green cycles just to cross the intersection and even traffic police officers posted at the crossing looked helpless.

More happy citizens! I'm sure India just HATES rail!


OCKLAWAHA

Don't you just love the Indian newspapers!  Talk about take-no-prisoners journalism. But I wonder what a jugalbandi is?