Not your parents’ bus transit

THE ELECTRIC MOTOR OF LIGHT RAIL vehicles makes a distinctive high-pitched whir, letting people know their ride is approaching. From Portland to Dallas to Baltimore, cities have built light rail systems as an alternative to higher-capacity, extremely high-priced subways and commuter trains. Yet light rail is still expensive, costing municipalities billions of dollars to build, and in the few cities that have built lines, most taxpayers still prefer the convenience of driving to work.

During the mid-1990s, the U.S. Federal Transportation Administration (FTA) began searching for a more cost-effective alternative to light rail. The result was Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). Boston, Cleveland, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, and Pittsburgh all have already implemented BRT, with many other cities exploring possible systems.

BRT is not your average bus line. Increased-capacity buses run along car-free busways, exclusive bus lanes in mixed-vehicle traffic, and simplified express service routes. Large shelters or stations are constructed at every stop, fares are pre-paid, and new technologies such as traffic signal prioritization and satellite vehicle tracking keep the vehicles moving along quickly. BRT-enthusiasts tout the vehicles as faster and more comfortable than traditional city buses. Moreover, because BRT is trackless, it allows cities to change routes over time—something not possible with trains.

Though BRT differs in obvious ways from light rail, BRT’s greatest success comes when it most closely resembles rail systems. This means bus lines with names or colors instead of numbers, running along a limited number of key corridors. In Los Angeles, for example, shiny BRT buses now run between the San Fernando Valley and North Hollywood on the 14.5-mile Metro Orange Line, a formerly abandoned railroad right-of-way that is completely separated from traffic. The 60-foot long, low-noise Orange Line vehicles have aerodynamic styling and wide doors, and carry more people than a typical city bus. Opened in October 2005, the route includes thirteen stations, spaced at one-mile intervals.

Similarly, the Miami-Dade Transit Agency opened the South Miami Busway in 1997 on a thirteen-mile, 100-foot-wide right-of-way alongside the heavily congested U.S. Route 1 highway. As a result, ridership increased by 250 percent from the conventional bus routes that had served the area, to 15,000 riders per day. Roosevelt Bradley, the Director of Miami-Dade Transit, said, “When you see cars on U.S. 1 moving 5 mph or less and our buses zoom by at 35 mph or greater, it tells a story.” Miami-Dade Transit is planning on purchasing what Roosevelt calls sleek, “futuristic-looking,” high-capacity buses to attract attention and distinguish BRT even further from conventional buses.

The BRT systems in Miami and Los Angeles work wonderfully—but they also have permanent stations, separate right-of-ways, and buses that resemble light rail vehicles. And the more a BRT system resembles light rail, the closer it comes to having light rail capital costs. In Los Angeles, the new Orange Line BRT cost approximately $22.8 million per mile. Cleveland’s Euclid Corridor BRT system, opened in 2003, was even more expensive at $29.7 million per mile. On the other hand, according to a U.S. General Accounting Office study, the capital costs of light rail projects in thirteen cities averaged $36.4 million per mile—and so, while BRT lines do cost less, the savings are not always significant. Other bus systems, such as express buses, can cost drastically less. Los Angeles, for instance, implemented the express Metro Rapid service on Wilshire Boulevard for a cost of $200,000 per mile.

In Boston, residents of the city’s South End neighborhood came out strongly against their 2.4-mile mixed-traffic section of the Silver Line BRT project. Despite an impressive 85 percent increase in ridership since the Silver Line opened in 2002, some South End residents disparagingly refer to the Silver Line as the “48” (the number assigned to the conventional bus previously serving the same route). In a way, the 60-foot long, high-capacity buses appear to be victims of their own success: ridership increases have led to over-crowding at peak hours and regular complaints of long waits. Silver Line critics contend that light rail, which can provide higher capacities in dense urban areas, is what Boston really needed.

Dennis Hinebaugh, the Director of the National Bus Rapid Transit Institute, disputes that light rail is the answer to BRT capacity problems. “It’s nice to say you can build light rail instead of BRT to handle more riders,” said Hinebaugh, “but nobody has done that and there’s no light rail in this country running at full capacity.” He points to Bogotá, Colombia, where a vast BRT network carries approximately 1 million people per day. While this capacity is impressive, most U.S. riders would probably not put up with the cramped conditions endured by Bogotans.

Not that BRT, with a potentially inescapable image problem, may ever reach a point where under-capacity is the norm in this country. According to Ron Utt, a Senior Transportation Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, BRT may not catch on here simply because riders don’t like buses. Utt described the recent debate over the proposed 23.5-mile Dulles Corridor BRT project that would have served northern Virginia. He said the project was defeated because, “Despite strong advocacy for BRT, it was so unfashionable… There is the romance of the rails that attracts people. Nobody ever talks about the romance of buses.”

Some BRT advocates see the systems as an interim step that can convince the public of the benefits of public transit, spurring commitments of larger investments in light rail. A 2001 U.S. General Accounting Office report suggests that BRT is an effective way to establish a mass transit corridor, secure a transit right-of-way, and build ridership to the point where an agency can prove that light rail justifies the costs. In Houston, 30 percent of BRT riders surveyed had not used transit before—suggesting that BRT may be luring drivers to mass transit. And many transit agencies—including Miami, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Boston—are at least entertaining the use of BRT as an interim step on the way to light rail. Rex Gephardt, Director of Regional Transit Planning for the Los Angeles MTA said, “When you’ve met your [BRT capacity] limits, your only option is light rail. And that’s exactly what the feds want to do with BRT: use that concept for transit agencies to justify rail as opposed to agencies just writing a report that justifies it.”

BRT can be a useful transit system, especially if a city is just starting to invest in mass transit rather than seeking a permanent solution to its transportation problems. And transit officials believe that permanent transit systems, whether BRT or light rail, can help to influence a city’s economic development. That said, it remains to be seen whether BRT will have a major role in urban development in the United States, and, even if it does, whether it will provide a sufficient long-term solution to transportation challenges.