In midtown the other day, I came across an MTA bus plastered with an ad for the Discovery Channel's Pompeii: The Last Day. It showed an exploding volcano and asked, "How do you outrun an eruption that's faster than this bus?"

It made me laugh. Whomever wrote the copy for that ad has a serious misunderstanding of either geology or New York City transportation. I don't know about a volcanic eruption, but if you want to outrun a bus in midtown Manhattan, all you have to do is walk.

New York City has the slowest buses in America. The M34, winner of the 2004 Pokey Award, lurches across town at 4 mph (slower than the average cruising speed of a king penguin). And you can ride the train to Philadelphia in less time than it takes the M15 to run its 10-mile route from South Ferry to East Harlem.

Of course, it doesn't have to be so bad. While New York bus riders agonize, cities around the world are setting up bus rapid transit. The best BRT systems give buses their own dedicated lanes separate from cars and trucks. Fares are collected on the platform before passengers board, reducing the waiting time at each stop. The vehicles are extra-long, clean-burning and have low floors, again, for fast boarding. Real-time information systems let passengers know exactly when the next bus will arrive and allow routers to manage more effectively. And buses have signal priority. If a bus is running late, traffic lights automatically turn green for it.

BRT has produced dramatic increases in bus speeds, reliability and ridership. Bogotá, Columbia is one of the biggest successes. BRT has been a key part of this city of seven million's rapid transformation from a traffic-choked disaster to a model of sustainable urban development.

BRT is a no-brainer for New York City. First and Second Avenues are begging for it, and there are obvious routes in the outer boroughs as well. Compared to light rail (which could also be great here), BRT is fast and cheap to start up, and there is a pile of federal funding available for it.

But in the same amount of time that Bogotá transformed itself, New York will have only managed to hire consultants to do a $2 million study (You could fill an extra-long, double-articulated bus with the dusty tomes of unheeded NYC transportation studies. If every dollar that was paid to transportation consultants over the last 30 years were actually put into transportation improvements, well, now that would be an interesting study...) The MTA has earmarked $22 million in its 2005-2009 capital plan to implement the study's recommendations. They and their consultants are appearing in each borough to present the idea of BRT and foster a "public involvement process."

I attended the meeting at Brooklyn Borough Hall last week and, frankly, I got the same feeling I often get at these meetings: A little less bureaucratic process and a little more fascism might be a good thing here. In the outer boroughs in particular, much of the public is never going to be happy with the idea taking away a lane of travel capacity or parking and dedicating it to mass transit. But this is simply what we have to do to begin to prepare New York City for the serious macro-environmental challenges of the 21st century. So, let's go. Let's stop "studying" and let's start "doing." Let's get some tests and experiments up and running and then study those.

As usual, the future of BRT in New York City comes down to funding. The measly allocation of $22 million essentially ensures that we won't have real BRT any time soon. Rather, New York is much more likely to get something like Boston's Silver Line. Unlike Bogotá, Boston didn't have the cajones to restrict private cars. So now Boston's got the "Silver Lie," an expensive bus with a new coat of paint stuck behind the same old double-parked, single-passenger SUVs. Ultimately, the real barrier to getting BRT up and running isn't technological or fiscal. It's cultural and political. To make BRT work New York City needs to muster up the will to take away a lane of traffic from the spoiled urban motorist.

Bus rapid transit in Bogota, a town with the cajones to keep automobiles in their place...

2:11 PM | Link |