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BRT-lite [an alternative]Prologue
With the challenge of global warming, we must find a way the make public transit an attractive alternative to the auto. I have found the examples of BRT in Curitiba and Bogotá inspiring.
But do these examples represent appropriate technology for the East Bay? Curitiba’s BRT is on a central spine lined with apartment towers and Bogotá’s arterial resembles an I-80 parking lot. Even USA cities much larger and denser then ours like Los Angeles have not taken a lane away for BRT. It seems removing a lane and parking for BRT in the East Bay is overkill and unnecessary to significantly improve public transit.
To quote from the Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) funded by the FTA:
In the United States and Canada, BRT is typically most successful when the urban population exceeds 750,000 and employment in the central business district (CBD) is, at a minimum, between 50,000 and 75,000. Land uses should be organized in dense patterns that facilitate transit use.
There is no example in North America of a BRT that has taken away a lane for bus-only in each direction on a low-density city street that has only two lanes and parking in each direction. And no North American bus system uses POP (Proof of Payment).
I have called my alternative BRT-LITE (I have seen this term in the literature) to distinguish it from Rapid Bus Plus, because it does not propose anything that would provide faster and more reliable service. For instance, having cleaner, fuel efficient true low-floor buses is simply something every line should have and instituting POP is something no line should have if AC Transit is adverse to losing money.
BRT-LITE with the bulb-outs does increase efficiency and reliability. I don’t know if this has been done system-wide elsewhere. It seems like a middle way for small cities and we can be the first. It is cost effective, doable within a reasonable time period, will have the community behind it and attract new riders because it will make bus riding a pleasure. People will be tempted to leave the comfort of their cars if they have reliable service, safe attractive places to wait for the bus and a comfortable bus to ride on.
BRT-LITE [An Alternative]
1) Split up the 1R route. It is asymmetrical. The East Oakland portion of the route has heavy ridership and probably requires 60-ft buses but only 40-ft buses are needed on Telegraph between downtown Oakland and downtown Berkeley. So the route from East Oakland should follow the old 82 line and end at the West Oakland BART station and the one from downtown Berkeley would have the Oakland Amtrak station in Jack London as its terminus.
2) Try to locate Rapid stops where there is some existing activity, stores, etc., so people feel safe and can do something while waiting for the bus.
3) Provide bulb-outs at all Rapid stops with an attractive, comfortable shelter with posted schedules, a working real-time information display, and create place-making with trees and special paving. The bulb-outs should accommodate a pedestrian cross walk plus a 40-ft bus on the downtown Berkeley to the Oakland Amtrak station in Jack London route. And they should accommodate 60-ft buses on the old 82 line.
The bulb-outs mean a bus can save time because it does not need to maneuver to a curb and then get back into the flow of traffic. It means, ipso facto, a bus priority lane is created and no parking is lost. Parked cars along a busy street act as a safety barrier for pedestrians. To help prevent double parking, every block with some commercial development on it should have a limited time loading zone.
4) Level boarding created at the Rapid bus bulb-outs.
5) Continue with local service for those who have difficulty walking. The local only stops will remain at the curb so the Rapid can easily pass.
6) VERY IMPORTANT: Select buses that decrease dwell time and make the riding experience a pleasure. That means not the low-aisle Van Hools but true low floor American buses that one can enter and sit with ease and has a ride smooth enough for reading.
The only reason buses are slower than cars is they have to pick up passengers so decreasing the dwell time is very important.7) Select buses that are energy efficient, and will cut down on air pollution and greenhouse gases such as diesel/electric hybrid buses. *
8) As with all BRT, provide signal priority and stops that are on the far side of a cross street.
9) Proof-of-payment (POP)** is not advisable. It is used successfully on some rail lines because they have fewer stops. But cheating is too easy on buses so it is used on very few, if any, BRTs in the USA. But uses of flash passes and Translink should be encouraged through financial incentives. One city has encouraged the use of Smart Cards by offering free transfers. Within a few weeks most riders were using them.
*See GHG for an even better idea!
** POP as discussed in Berkeley Daily Planet:
[As an AC Transit staff member pointed out to me, Peeples mistook “flash pass” for “POP.” “Flash pass” is, say, like a monthly pass that you flash in front of the driver as you enter; 22 bus agencies were using them at the time this was written. None were using POP.]
Letters to the Editor
Published Friday, April 22, 2005, in the Berkeley Daily Planet
AC TRANSIT BUSES
Editors, Daily Planet:I respect Joyce Roy’s right to her observations and opinions (“AC Transit’s Van Hools Hated by Riders, Drivers,” April-14). Unfortunately, once she moved beyond her observations and opinions, virtually every fact in her comment is mistaken.
AC Transit’s Van Hool A330s are “true low floor” buses in that they have a flat floor from the front all the way to the back wall of the bus. In a true low floor design, seats must be on risers in order to accommodate necessary elements such as fuel tanks, batteries and the drive shaft.
Far from being “dreamed up in AC Transit’s ivory tower,” true low floor buses are the norm in Europe, ridden by millions of people every day. Every Van Hool A330 in the world is a true low floor bus with most of their seats on risers. All of the new Mercedes Citaro buses (the most popular bus in the world) are true low floor buses with most of their seats on risers. The same is true for new models from Volvo, Scandia, Fiat, etc., all with their seats on risers. Toyota and Nissan have similar models in Japan.
One of the advantages of a true low floor bus is that it allows for a third door on a standard bus and a fourth door on an articulated bus. That, in turn, allows a proof-of-payment (POP) fare system to work much more efficiently. With a POP system, if a passenger has a proof that she or he has paid (such as a monthly pass, a transfer or some group pass such as the UC Berkeley Class Pass or an Eco Pass) she or he can board through any door. Passengers who need to pay board through the front door and pay as usual and get a receipt. Fare inspectors periodically come through to make sure that everyone has paid.
With POP on the Van Hools, persons with any mobility difficulty would generally board through the wide middle door. For seniors and persons with disabilities that would give them immediate access to all seven ground level seats. For those with strollers, shopping carts, etc., they would have the large flat area in the middle of the bus for their devices.
According to the APTA’s (American Public Transportation Association) 2004 Transit Fare Summary there are 22 agencies in North America that use POP on buses. POP is almost universal on light rail. If you have ridden light rail above ground in San Francisco, you have ridden on a POP system. If you have ridden light rail anywhere in San Jose or Sacramento, you have ridden on a POP system.
In Europe, POP is ubiquitous on both bus and rail systems. Paris, for example, has used POP on buses for 40 years in my personal experience and still uses a form of POP today. (Paris is now experimenting to see if when they introduce a “smart card” (as the Bay Area is doing with TransLink) they can speed up boarding enough so that POP is no longer needed.)
Every POP system deals with the interrelated issues of enforcement costs and fare evasion. There is some literature on those issues and AC Transit is struggling with them at the moment. I hope that we can find some solution and implement POP on an experimental basis soon.
H. E. Christian Peeples
At-Large Director, Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District
* * * * *
Letters to the Editor
Published Friday, April 29, 2005, in the Berkeley Daily Planet
COMEDIAN IN TRANSIT
Editors, Daily Planet:It warms my heart when an unemployed or retired comedian finds something to keep him busy, which is obviously the good luck of H. E. Christian Peeples, at-large director of the Alameda Contra Costa Transit District. When I read his defense of the Van Hool buses—a tour of European proof-of-payment (POP, isn’t that cute?) fare systems and bus manufacturers—I recognized the style immediately. Peeples must have been a writer for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and is obviously the author of the “Dead Parrot” skit, in which the customer keeps waving a bird corpse in the face of the pet store owner, who keeps saying, in many different ways, that the parrot looks fine to him. Hilarious.
I look forward to Peeples riding these buses to pick up new material, maybe another skit for the “Department of Funny Walks,” as he watches people, old and young, lurching toward and away from seats, climbing up and down, while clutching for non-existent hand-holds. This fun will never end, even if the POP system is ever instigated, because riders who don’t have “a monthly pass, a transfer or some group pass,” (meaning most of the older riders) will still begin at the fare box and stagger on from there. There are no limits here—how about a “Department of Funny Falls and Crawls” joke. I can’t wait.
Dorothy Bryant
EARTH TO PEEPLES
Editors, Daily Planet:
How blessed we are to be informed by the Almighty H.E. Christian Peeples that the Van Hool buses are, in fact, wonderful buses. As one of the directors of AC Transit, he has been on a one-man crusade to force these buses on the riders. Despite an avalanche of complaints, and almost near-universal loathing by the people who actually have to endure these buses, Peeples has done nothing for the last two years except to contradict what his own constituency says, and to dictate to us that the buses are good and we are just too ignorant to realize this obvious fact. Peeples even used this issue as his single campaign platform in 2004, promising to “better inform the ridership” of the quality of Van Hool buses, in the face of overwhelming hatred of them. (Being an incumbent, running essentially unopposed, he coasted to victory in any event.)
To rebut just a few of the many distortions, absurdities and irrelevancies in his letter in the April 22 issue of the Daily Planet:
It doesn’t matter why the seats are inaccessible; it doesn’t matter how common this ill-conceived design is in other transit districts, and it doesn’t matter whether other bus designs are equally bad; all that matters is that AC Transit’s ridership hates these buses. Period. All his rationalizations are without purpose.
Peeples then goes on to say that “one of the advantages” of the new buses is that is has a third door, without ever listing any other supposed advantages. In fact, this is the only “advantage” he can point to. And what is the point of having a third door, according to Peeples? Because the third door “allows a proof-of-payment (POP) fare system to work much more efficiently.” Well, isn’t that nice? Too bad AC Transit doesn’t have a proof-of-payment fare system. In other words, there is no advantage to having these buses. Oh, but Peeples will counter, by having the buses we can implement a POP system. See—they do it in foreign countries, even on San Francisco’s Muni rail system.
Earth to Peeples...Earth to Peeples...Can you read me? Have you ever ridden on the N-Judah at rush hour or late at night? Almost everybody cheats. Very few people actually pay the fare, knowing that inspectors are extremely rare. (I’ve never seen one.) Same goes for Paris and the Netherlands, where (in the poorer areas at least) fare-dodging is de rigueur. The Parisian transit authority knows this, and sees giving essentially free transport to the unemployed youth from the banlieus as a form of welfare. But what the result has been is a massive financial crisis in the transit system, which is exactly why (as Peeples foolishly pointed out) they are switching to “smart cards,” to crack down on ubiquitous fare evasion.
As Peeples revealed in his final paragraph, the entire Van Hool fiasco is part of a grandiose attempt at social engineering on his part, when he admits, “I hope that we can...implement POP on an experimental basis soon.” The only way he’ll be able to implement POP is by getting these buses in place first, come hell or high water. And why does Peeples want to implement POP? Hmmm? Well, I’ll leave the readers to come to their own conclusions on that one, other than to say: Encouraging fare evasion is his goal.
As a result, the rest of us have to spend our days unable to find seats, standing shoulder-to-shoulder next to other disgruntled passengers nursing their bruised shins and staring resignedly at the chipper “Bus of the Year, 2003!” signs plastered on every diabolical Van Hool, while the Grand Poobahs down at AC Transit HQ pitably reenact the same failed social engineering blunder that Paris is in the process of abandoning after it practically destroyed their economy.
In other news, the grain harvest was better than ever this year in the Ukraine.
Gerald Mannell
* * * * *
Published Tuesday, May 3, 2005, in the Berkeley Daily Planet
PROOF OF PAYMENT
Editors, Daily Planet:
Transit proof of payment (POP) fare systems, derided in recent letters, have been used in civilized countries for decades. Details vary. The general idea is that you buy a ticket before boarding the vehicle. A machine located either at the stop or on board stamps the ticket with the date and time. Inspectors occasionally walk through and ask to see everyone’s tickets. Anyone without a ticket or with one that has expired (time and date no longer valid) is fined an amount intended to discourage repeat offenses.
POP sees use on buses, LRT, ferries, and commuter trains. Its primary objectives are to
1. Improve service quality by minimizing the time spent stopped while passengers board and alight.
2. Allow the operator (driver) to concentrate on driving without worrying about fare collection.
3. Reduce operating cost by increasing the mileage driven and passengers carried during a driver shift.
In other words, transit becomes faster, safer, and cheaper to produce. AC Transit deserves praise for planning ahead to implement these proven improvements.
Robert R. Piper
Berkeley Director of Transportation, 1976-78
* * * * *
Published Tuesday, May 31, 2005, in the Berkeley Daily Planet
Readers Sound Off on New AC Transit Buses, Policies
Editors, Daily Planet:
I read with great interest Gerald Mannell’s letter about a “massive financial crisis” in the transit systems of the Netherlands and France, because too many people just don’t pay on the proof-of-payment system. Yet Robert R. Piper (who was Berkeley director of transportation a quarter-century ago?) knows better. He informs us Berkeley primitives that POP “has been used in civilized countries for decades.”
Let me add my voice to Mannell’s.
I just got back from New York City, where I walked and rode buses and subways with my cousins visiting from Italy. Their opinion of “proof of payment” in Italy? A disaster. People don’t pay. When a rare inspector catches one, he tries to collect a fine, but invariably the cheater says he has no money. So, the inspector writes and hands him a citation to pay, which the non-paying rider ignores. On rare occasions the government goes after a non-payer—adding yet more costs to a transit system in financial collapse.
By the way, it was a delight to ride the New York buses (plenty of hand-holds, most seats on the side to make wide aisles) and absolute heaven to ride one of their new electric (not trolley) buses with NO steps up from either entry or exit, a couple of steps up to a few seats in the back of the bus where the floor is higher to accommodate the batteries. A smooth, quiet, non-smelly, comfortable ride, with no need to climb up unless you are willing an able to take those few raised seats at the back. I didn’t manage to get the name of the company that makes them, but I assume the AC Transit officials must know about them—I’d like to know why AC chose the Van Hool buses instead. Could it be because these “civilized” European countries don’t want them anymore?
Dorothy Bryant
* * * * *