BRT proved it's worthless... again...

[Ocklawaha]

The evidence keeps mounting that BRT is a completely "made-up" concept, designed to fool the public into thinking they are getting rapid transit at a bargain. Back under GW, the oil president, the government had zero interest in Light Rail or other alternate energy modes. BRT has been sold all over the world as better then rail, the low cost alternative, and Just like rail only cheaper.

Not so my friends, a bus is a bus, is a bus.

OCKLAWAHA

Chi-Dooh Li: 'Bus rapid transit' slipped on the ice

By CHI-DOOH LI
SPECIAL TO THE P-I

The memorable 2008 Christmas season snowfall was a great blessing or great curse, depending on your liking for the white stuff and your ability to move around when 90 percent of public and private transportation was paralyzed by treacherous roads.

One long-term blessing for which I am thankful is that the notion of "bus rapid transit" was administered an icy coup de grace, dying an ignominious death that it long deserved.

I speak of buses as a form of "rapid" transit. In the public transit scheme, buses have been and will ever be an essential element until some budding young Einstein figures out a way that we can all be teleported the way they do it in "Star Trek."

For the past several decades, the snake-oil salesmen of the transportation world have been hawking "bus rapid transit" as the fiscally responsible and affordable (tightwads rejoice!) alternative to light rail.

If "bus rapid transit" were a fairy tale, it would be told as a revisionist Cinderella story where we, like the beloved heroine, could forever travel in a beautiful carriage drawn by a team of handsome white horses.

In fact, the snow showed us the carriage was nothing more than a rotting pumpkin, and the white horses turned out to be a very tired bunch of mice. In other words, not the most reliable form of transportation devised by man or beast.

You have to wonder how many "bus rapid transit" enthusiasts actually stood in the freezing weather during the two-week cold spell and waited for buses that never came, or buses that drove on without stopping because they were already crammed full.

Did our snake-oil peddlers experience, as my daughter and I did one night, waiting in the Convention Center Station until any hope of getting on a bus had faded, and we abandoned the effort and called my wife to come get us?

For sure this kind of snow and cold is unusual for a region accustomed to milder winters. But we found out, didn't we, that in snowy and icy conditions, buses cannot be depended upon as public transportation, much less as "rapid transit."

The good news is that by the end of this year, the first 16 miles of light rail from Westlake to Sea-Tac Airport will be complete. Funding is secured for the extension to Husky Stadium, and the federal government continues to consider our region's light rail projects as highest priority for purposes of federal funding aid.

No one questions that light rail is costly, as are any long-term infrastructure improvements. Highways, bridges and ferry systems aren't cheap, either. Residents of this region have paid an added hidden and incalculable cost in lost time, wasted fuel, squandered efficiency and personal stress from the endemic traffic congestion we have lived with for so many years. And what about the jobs lost when companies have packed up and moved away because of traffic gridlock in our region?

We might have been spared those costs if an earlier generation of myopic voters had not repeatedly turned down in the late 1960s and early '70s, a rail mass transit system extending from Everett to Tacoma and to points east of Lake Washington, funded 90 percent by the federal government.

Almost 35 years later, the first 16 miles of light rail are the appetizer to a full course public transportation meal. There will be no phony "rapid transit" entrees on the light rail menu. The trains will operate, whether we are deluged by rain, blanketed with snow or frozen by ice.

Some day when the full light rail grid system is completed, accounts of the great transportation breakdown of December 2008 will be told by old-timers to describe life as it once was long ago.

Perhaps by then the laughable term "bus rapid transit" will also fade from memory, derided by transportation historians as a great hoax that fooled some of the people some of the time, but was eventually consigned to the "flim-flam" file by plain common sense.

Until then, if the "bus rapid transit" folks want to continue to insult our intelligence, perhaps they will have the decency to add the following disclaimer to their tireless advocacy of the concept:

"Bus rapid transit: not valid in snowy weather or congested traffic."

[Lunican]

[Ocklawaha]

GREAT photos Lunican, wonder if anyone can find a LRT Vehicle being pushed in the snow? LOL!

A RERUN OF MY ODE TO JTA-BRT

It's midnight at the bus stop
And I drag myself in line.
Travellin' light, I got to go
But the bus won't be on time.
Everybody's looking half alive.
Later on the bus arrives.


Got my prepaid ticket
I find a seat
And we move out in the lights.
Come on Driver, where's the heat?
It's cold this Jacksonville night.
I keep telling to myself that I don't care.
It's now tomorrow, I'll soon be there.


Using this BRT, It's a dog of a way to get around.
Riding around on BRT.
It's a dog gone easy way to get you down.
Tired of watching this City go by
So I look across the aisle.
The window's frosted, I can't see
But the girl returns my smile.
She reminds me of someone waiting at my home.
So I doze. So it goes.


I'm wrinkled on my seat at the transfer stop.
There's a Hooker being cozy with a Jacksonville cop.
My coffee's tasting tired.
My eyes roll over dead.
They should have built the rail, and got the gas out of our heads.
Oh, to be at home in bed.


You got me driving.
I'm on your JTA bus and you're driving.
But there's nothing new about JTA.
Nothing new about feeling grey.
Nothing new about putting off
Or putting myself on.


Looking for tomorrow is the way the commuter survives
I should have realized by now that all my life's a ride.
It's time to find some happy times and make myself some friends
I know there ain't no rainbows waiting when this journey ends.


Stepping off this dirty bus first time I understood
There's got to be an alternative that's good
That's a thought for keeping if I could.
There's got to be an alternative that's good.

With deep apology's to the Late Great Harry Chapin, and the song "Greyhound."

OCKLAWAHA