My fave part of taking the Big Blue Bus rapid 10 — which takes me from Santa Monica to downtown via the 10 freeway in about half an hour — is when we’re first getting on the 10 freeway from Bundy. Inevitably, a half dozen to a dozen cars’ll be waiting in the right lane behind the “one car per green” light, while we in the bus zoom past them in the left carpool lane –
Apparently, Gold Line passengers also get to experience this feeling. Watch this 1-minute video and consider how effective it’d be as a Metro ad. (via The Bus Bench)
Someday this could be a great ad for bus service, too, if we all lobby/vote for bus only lanes! Thanks for sharing and happy new year –
Linda
Comment by Linda Gamberg — December 30, 2008 @ 1:11 pm
V. interesting that you should mention bus only lanes, Linda! Is the BBB officially in favor of the Wilshire bus only lanes?
I think many of us Santa Monica residents would like to see our city (and our local bus system) officially get behind the bus only lanes effort, as our city by the beach is not part of the project yet….
Comment by Siel — December 30, 2008 @ 1:53 pm
Bus only lanes will prove to be a problem. After all, there’s going to be one in each direction. There are, however, three varieties of service. There would need to be a way for Rapids to leapfrog local buses.
Comment by Wad — January 20, 2009 @ 10:16 pm
I dare say the bus only lanes will prove to be less a problem than the problems traffic as is is creating right now. Of course, there’ll be an adjustment period…
Comment by Siel — January 21, 2009 @ 6:30 pm
Actually, Siel, there are some “force multipliers” that bus lanes would likely cause.
You have to plan for the likely scenario that a lane’s worth of traffic is not going to shift to the buses, but the cars would shift to other streets. This means other bus lines would be slowed on parallel streets.
Connecting buses would also be slowed as traffic snarls cause intersecting streets to slow.
There is of course the widespread misperception that if public transit is carrying 7% of trips in the county, it is operating at 7% capacity. Wilshire, in particular, is a massively overcrowded line. Ridership is beyond the physical capacities of buses.
You know what will happen if a bus lane is added? More people will ride! In the case of Wilshire, there’s no room for more riders. Adding more service will only hamper throughput, especially when dealing with mixed local and limited-stop service.
Comment by Wad — January 21, 2009 @ 11:06 pm
I agree the 720 line’s popular, but I tend to think the crowding issues on the Wilshire lines also has a lot to do with traffic delays that create crowd jams. There’ll be no buses for a while, then two will arrive at once, both crowded. Then a third and fourth will arrive like a minute later and be almost empty.
Because that kind of thing happens so often, there’s little point to adding buses right now. If we had dedicated bus lanes, the buses would hopefully run more on sched and the crowds even out more — and make it easier to add more buses running closer together — every 2 minutes from 7 – 7 or something like that….
I’ll be interested in seeing what Metro comes back with in its BRT study for Wilshire –
Comment by Siel — January 23, 2009 @ 2:18 pm