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 –

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.

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….