How "Rapid" is BRT?

[thelakelander]

An blogger's opinion of Cleveland's new BRT system.  Jax should take notes.

Published by Rob Pitingolo on Sep 9, 2009 at 4:50 PM

I'll admit, I am a little late to the party on this one. It's been nearly a year since Cleveland launched its new BRT, the Healthline, and since Streetsblog proclaimed the line was getting "rave reviews". Now that I live in a part of town with better access to the Healthline, I finally got a chance to take a ride. My overall impression: wow, the Healthline is really painfully slow...

Perhaps my expectations were too high, but for all the hype, the improved boarding platforms, pre-paid fare system, dedicated bus lanes, unique traffic signals, and the fact that it has "rapid transit" in the name, I think I was justified in believing that its speed might be somewhat synonymous with rapid.

The official schedule lists an 8am weekday trip from East 105th & Euclid Avenue to Superior & East Roadway as taking 23 minutes. That's a distance of 4.08 miles. Calculating it out gives you the average speed for the trip as a whopping 10.6 mph.

Contrast this with the Red Line, an actual rapid transit line. On a comparable trip, from the University Circle Station to the Tower City Station, the schedule lists the ride as taking 13 minutes. The route is 5.34 track miles long, giving it an average speed of 24.6 mph.

I haven't actually timed it, but I am pretty confident that I could ride my bike down the Euclid Avenue corridor at least as fast as 10.6 mph. So why is the Healthline so slow?

For one thing, there are probably too many stops. If a subway or elevated rail line had been built along the same corridor, I suspect there probably would be about half as many stops. Bus lines always have way too many stops; some local buses have a stop at every single city block. The Healthline has them slightly more spaced out but still relatively close together. The unfortunate thing about designing the system with so many stops is that it makes it that much more difficult to develop around any single one of them, a problem I suspect that Healthline will face if the economic climate in Cleveland is ever favorable to development again.

The second problem is that there is an overabundance of traffic lights and the Healthline doesn't seem to be technologically advanced enough to efficiently cruise through them. I always imagined that true BRT would be equipped with some sort of GPS or a similar technology that would change the traffic lights just as buses arrive so that they would never sit at a a red light... kind of in the same spirit as emergency vehicles that can manipulate traffic lights to get where they are going more quickly. Unfortunately, this is not the case with the Healthline. Sitting at long red lights is the name of the game.

Needless to say, I was disappointed with the Heathline from a speed aspect. Eucid Avenue looks great, though. The bike lanes are definitely the best part (although I will have more to say about that soon). So there certainly has been improvement along the corridor; but the improvements have more to do with aesthetics and bicycle improvements than with transit itself.

I hope this serves as a lesson to cities that are thinking about investing in BRT instead of rail. I think The Overhead Wire is correct in arguing that you get what you pay for with BRT. When interest groups argue that BRT is a cheaper alternative to light or heavy rail, an important question to ask is exactly why it is so much cheaper. If you want to do BRT right, and you want it to truly be a form of rapid transit, then you're going to have to pay, anyway.

http://blog.robpitingolo.org/2009/09/how-rapid-is-brt.html

3 comments:

Pantograph Trolleypole said... 6:56 PM
I might add that the problems you mentioned aren't just problems for BRT but also LRT on arterial streets as well. The T Third that just opened up in San Francisco has some of the same issues due to too many stops. The distance of that new section of line is 5.1 miles and it takes 26 minutes on the schedule or 12 mph. I wonder if there was any time savings benefit to electrification of the health line and why they didn't consider it.   

Rob Pitingolo said... 7:26 PM
Pantograph Trolleypole, perhaps it would have been appropriate to also compare the Healthline to Cleveland's two LRT lines as well. Both the Green and Blue lines east of Shaker Square are at-grade and required to obey traffic signals (with I think one exception on each line where they travel under a busy cross-street). Regardless, the average speeds on those stretches of track are 16.7 mph for the Green Line and 14.5 mph for the Blue Line. In my opinion, a major difference is the fact that the proportion of red lights that they stop for is much lower and the time they spent stopped at those red lights is lower as well.   

Anonymous said... 1:00 PM
A cyclist of average competence can average 15 mph over a 10 mile urban commute.

Bike commute is definitely faster than 10 mph.

[Ocklawaha]

Busway Safety? This is on the Pittsburgh BRT exclusive busway in 1995, just imagine the JTA concept, now said to be abandoned, of a busway 40 feet above the Arlington Expressway or CSX?


The disturbing portion of this story is the JTA official line that BRT is faster, or better then rail. Sorry to inform you all that this is a widely distributed LIE, brought to you from the same lobby responsible for the streetcar holocaust of 1930-60. Guess where the "better then rail," information website came from? Check out this link's address.  www. WHAT?

http://www.jtaonthemove.com/Graphics/RTS/BRT/pdf/BRT-LRT%20Comparison.pdf

Lake, notice that the "Health Line" is considered electric, as it is hybrid-Diesel-electric, with a 90% cut in sulfur emmissions. The DOWNSIDE is the Hybrid buses cost just $300,000 less then full size streetcar vehicles, and the buses have about 1/3 of the life expectency. The worst part of this BRT nighmare is even with all of the money for the Hybrids, they didn't realize any time savings, as they would have with a 100% electric trolley bus or streetcar. Electric vehicles have much faster acceleration, in Portland, one can feel the gforce.

Check out this "IDEAL SPEED" from the BRT experts of the UK and USA:

Car users should be taxed more
The team also agreed to Indian experts who have said more people should use public transport as the mixed lane suffers the most on BRT stretches. “ The authorities should follow norms as practiced in other countries such as imposing greater tax on car users and trying to shift more people towards public transport,” Kost said. According to Hook, the average speed at the corrdior was quite slow. Instead of the ideal 25 km- per- hour average speed, the speed at Delhi’s BRT was around 13 kmph â€" quite slow for a BRT corridor. UK- based Bishop, a transport planner and visiting research fellow at TERI, advocated separate lanes for two- wheelers and the use of close- circuit television cameras to catch offenders. He added that overbridges should be used as a last resort, something that the Delhi government is already considering after receiving flak from all quarters during the chaotic trial run.

Source: http://www.itdp.org/index.php/news_events/news_detail/experts_from_us_uk_find_faults_with_brt/

Under the IDEAL'S of America's favorite Oil President, GW, the G.A.O. reports used pick and choose numbers that DON'T match the numbers published by the APTA or the individual transit operators. See it yourself:


Speed:
The GAO report's Figure 10 shows a 56-mile-an-hour BRT speed, but that must be without any stops for passengers. LRT is listed at 16 miles per hour which is realistic for the slower lines with the most stops and 36,727 weekday passengers. However, that speed includes the turn-around time at each terminus; the actual schedule speed is about 20 mph. The Dallas express bus system averaged 17 miles per hour in 1998 with many routes in all directions, but carried only 31,464 weekday passengers. There are only two LRT routes in Dallas, but they attract more passengers.

Denver received the most distorted portrayal by the GAO study, with LRT being reported at only 11 miles per hour. This was for the downtown segment of the route. The full route speed is 23 miles per hour. The bus speed of 35 miles per hour applies to the isolated freeway portion of the route.

The entire Los Angeles Green LRT Line also averages 35 miles per hour, with stops, for 33,000 weekday passengers. Rail cars have faster acceleration than bus, particularly on grades, where bus drivers sometimes turn off the air-conditioning to avoid very slow operation. This is not a problem with electric rail.

In Northern Virginia, the Shirley HOV-Busway is non-stop, but when off-line stops are added, the speed falls to 22 miles per hour, about the same as the schedule speed of many LRT lines. However, the Shirley service attracted only 12,868 weekday passengers in 1992, with losses since then. LRT averages about the same on suburban lines, but with far more patronage. Most BRT lines have limited or no weekend service for lack of demand.

Source: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d01984.pdf  (This is a large file, so give it a minute)

BRT DOES have a place in Jacksonville. We need more miles then anything JTA has come up with in the past, we need to pay some serious attention to linking our future transit plans/routes, to BRT feeders. These "busways" need not be any more expensive then high class, HOV lanes, however they should NEVER be built until JTA, and the City, will promise to keep close headways. The Miami-Kendall Busway, has a bus every two minutes, how often does the Blanding Busway in Jacksonville see a bus?

OCKLAWAHA
BRT-HERITAGE STREETCAR-TROLLEY BUS-SKYWAY-WATER TAXI-COMMUNITY BUS-CITY BUS-COMMUTER RAIL

[Lunican]

JTA averages about 2.75 miles per hour between Downtown and Springfield.

[thelakelander]

how often does the Blanding Busway in Jacksonville see a bus?

The current Blanding Busway is a little over 1.5 miles in length, running from 103rd to Morse.  The P3 runs every hour and uses this entire stretch as the east portion of a loop that takes it back to Jammes Street to get back downtown.  The WS2 has 30 minute headways and uses the dedicated lanes between Wesconnett and Morse.  When its all added up, you have an average of a bus using the dedicated lane segment every 32 minutes or so.

For all intents and purposes, if you really want to access the Blanding corridor, the WS2 is your only option and it comes twice an hour.  Personally, unless there is a plan to significantly increase bus service to Orange Park, spending millions for BRT improvements down that stretch would not be one of my top transit priorities in town.  That money would be better served in areas that can attract higher ridership and potential for denser transit friendly development.

[Ocklawaha]

The Ocklawaha vision for Gateway Plaza Transit Center

JTA averages about 2.75 miles per hour between Downtown and Springfield.

Thanks Lunican, where did you find this? I don't see the new planned BRT on Boulevard/Lem Turner doing more then maybe 12 MPH average. This would be far slower then any dedicated streetcar which could run up the old rail corridor from Beaver Street at Union Warehouse (North of Maxwell House) into Springfield, then angle over to Gateway. I would scrap the BRT from Rosa Parks to Gateway and create a mini - transit center across the street from the mall. This would serve the much faster and more frequent streetcars to the South, and feed 2 or 3 FREQUENT headway BRT routes to the North and West. South of Gateway buses would follow the traditional grid into downtown, the Boulevard route all the way to the Riverfront could be trolley bus. I would strive to get electric's in the downtown core, the first thing they would replace would be the PCT Trolley fleet.

OCKLAWAHA