Such things do exist, although I don’t think there are any in the US.

Bus from Bogota, Columbia. Image from Richard Layman’s flickr stream.

Based on feedback from this post, I’ve modified the map of Metrobus routes that use articulated buses.

Here is the updated route list.

• Many peak period buses are articulated:
  • 70 and 71 – Georgia Ave in DC
  • Y series – Georgia Ave in MD
  • S1 – 16th St
  • X2 – H St
  • Z series – Colesville Rd (shown truncated on the map)
• Occasionally articulated:
  • S2 – 16th St
  • J2 – East West Hwy / Old Georgetown Rd
  • C2 and C4 – University Blvd
  • K6 – New Hampshire Ave
  • R2 – Riggs Rd
• Rarely articulated:
  • L2 – Connecticut Ave
  • 5A – Dulles Airport
  • B30 – BWI Airport

Feel free to post additional comments / corrections.

Articulated buses have been getting a lot of attention lately. WMATA has expanded their use, and prior to selecting a streetcar Arlington considered using them on Columbia Pike. But where do the long buses actually run?

Curious to answer that question, I set out to identify the routes where I’ve seen articulated buses. This map shows the effort so far, but it’s probably incomplete. I don’t have any actual data on this, only what I’ve noticed anecdotally, and what a few other people have told me.

Take a look, and use the comments to let me know what I’ve missed or gotten wrong.

List of routes shown as “most articulated”:

• 70 – Georgia Ave in DC
• Y series – Georgia Ave in MD
• S1 – 16th St
• X2 – H St
• J2 – East West Hwy / Old Georgetown Rd
• Z series – Colesville Rd (shown truncated on the map)

Routes shown as “occasionally articulated”:

• L2 – Connecticut Ave
• S2 – 16th St (S4 also shown on map, will be removed with next draft)
• C2 and C4 – University Blvd
• K6 – New Hampshire Ave

Problem: Commuter buses that run on highways without HOV lanes are often stuck in the same congestion as cars, and there’s either no money, room, or political will to build a dedicated busway.

Solution: Let buses bypass highway congestion by running on existing highway shoulders.

Shoulders have limits; merging at exits would be complicated, bus speed would be limited for safety reasons, and buses would have to move in to the general lanes whenever someone needs the shoulder for a break down or police action. Still, shoulder running can improve transit travel times by a lot.

There are a handful of examples of this practice around the DC region today, most notably on the Dulles Access Road between the Beltway and I-66, but the idea could be easily implemented on a much wider scale.

Today at the Transportation Planning Board, members asked that a working group be convened to discuss further applicability of this idea in our region. The working group would consist of elected officials and staff members from the various jurisdictions and DOTs. Obviously their work has yet to start, but in a few years we might look back on today’s meeting as the beginning of a regional highway bus lanes network. Wouldn’t that be nice.

Dulles Access Road shoulder, with sign indicating bus use at peak periods.

Image by Talk Radio News Service.

Congress passed a major transportation bill last week, authorizing more than $100 billion in spending for highways, transit, and other modes over the next 2 years. The bill changes a number of rules and shifts the ways in which money is distributed, in an effort to preserve highway funding.

The bill generally maintains the status quo of federal transportation spending, but attempts to stretch the amount of money available for highways by eliminating or consolidating fringe programs, and shifting money from grants to loans.

$54.6 billion will be available per year, for the next 2 years. About 80% of funding will go to highways, and about 20% will go to transit. Both the overall funding level and the 80/20 split are comparable to existing allocations.

The gas tax will remain at 18.3¢ per gallon, as it has since 1993 when gas was $1.07. Since this won’t produce enough revenue to maintain current spending, almost $20 billion in federal general fund money will be infused in to the transportation fund.

Highways

As in every previous federal transportation authorization, the bulk of spending authority goes to highways. Most of the money will be automatically distributed to state Departments of Transportation, which will have the authority to determine spending on roads within their borders.

Little about this system will change, except that a little bit more money is available for highways due to cuts to other modes.

One thing that may change relating to highways is the make-up of the fleet of cars and trucks using them. This bill eliminates the so-called “gas guzzler tax, ” which raised a small amount of money but was a disincentive towards buying the least efficient cars and SUVs.

Another change is that more funding, up to $1 billion per year, is being directed to the TIFIA program, which offers loans to states and localities for major capital projects, instead of direct grants. TIFIA loan details are more favorable than private market deals, so this is a good option for large projects that don’t get grants. Meanwhile, by expanding a program that requires participants to pay it back, the feds stretch limited dollars further.

Transit

At one stage of negotiations, Republicans in Congress sought to eliminate transit funding altogether. That would have been a disaster. Thankfully it didn’t happen.

Much of the transit money flows to transit providers through automatic formulas, similarly to how highway money flows to state DOTs. The largest pot of non-automatic money is in the New Starts program, which is the major federal source for money to build new rapid transit routes.

New Starts is funded at $1.9 billion per year, which is $50 million per year less than the existing allocation.

For that money, the list of project types that are eligible to receive New Starts grants has been broadened, to include more BRT projects, as well as projects that expand the core capacity of existing transit lines. Also, a special category has been established for “demonstration projects” that are primarily funded with local or private money, and only need a little federal funding.

New Starts is extremely important. Virginia received $900 million from it to help build the Silver Line, and Maryland is counting on it to help fund the Purple Line, Corridor Cities Transitway, and Baltimore Red Line. Expanding the list of eligible uses is good, but it further spreads out an already diminished pot of money.

The competition for New Starts grants will be fierce, and the supply definitely won’t meet the demand.

Another change from previous law is that tax-exempt benefits for transit riders will continue to be capped at $125/month, while car drivers will continue to be eligible for corresponding parking benefits of up to $240/month. This is a blatant subsidy for driving over transit use, and is extremely unfortunate.

Some positive news is that there are two new transit programs established in the bill.

The first is a safety program that will institute nationwide safety standards for railcars, and require large transit agencies to establish safety plans. This is a direct outgrowth of WMATA’s problems in recent years, especially the June 2009 Metrorail crash.

The second new program will offer planning grants to help communities plan and build Transit Oriented Developments around transit stations, which is a nice win for smart growth.

Bike/ped

Bicycle and pedestrian funding was a major target for attack, and a major point of contention. Many rural and conservative congresspeople don’t understand the importance of these modes to urban transportation, and view them as unnecessary luxuries.

At several points throughout the negotiation process, it looked like dedicated bike/ped funding might be eliminated entirely. With the final adopted bill, it was reduced from about $1 billion annually to about $700 million annually. That’s too bad, but the fact that any survived at all is good news.

Of that $700 million, half will be distributed via automatic formula to Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) for use on bike/ped projects. Previously all of this money had been distributed to states, so sending it to metropolitan areas is an interesting change, and could be seen as an experiment in funneling money directly to metropolitan areas instead of through states.

Unfortunately, the other half of the $700 million in bike/ped money will go to state DOTs, who will have the option of either using it for bike/ped projects, or of flipping it in to their highway funds and using it for road projects. If all the states do this, it will decrease the total amount of federal bike/ped funding to just $350 million.

Although it is not strictly a dedicated bike/ped fund, another pot of money that is often used for bike/ped projects is the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program (CMAQ). Capital Bikeshare has largely been funded via CMAQ, so it is a significant program.

The good news is that CMAQ funding levels appear to be level. The bad news is that the list of eligible project types that can use CMAQ funds has been broadened to include a larger variety of road projects.

Environmental issues

Republicans in Congress had wanted to include in the bill funding for the Keystone Pipeline, which would have transported crude oil from Canada to refineries in the US. Democrats opposed it, and the fight was one of the most widely-reported sticking points in the negotiations.

Funding for the pipeline was not included, which was the major Republican concession agreed upon, in response to Democrat concessions regarding bike/ped and transit funding.

However, another aspect of the bill may have even more important and widespread effects.

A rarely-reported provision aimed at streamlining project delivery will eliminate the requirement for federal environmental review for a wide range of projects, including those within existing right-of-way, those that are below certain cost thresholds, and those that replace damaged infrastructure.

Excluding those projects will undoubtedly save millions of dollars, and months or even years of project planning. But it will also eliminate a key step in project review, and reduce the ability of localities to object to undesirable projects imposed on them by states. It is definitely a mixed blessing situation.

Summary

Just about everyone in the transportation policy world agrees that the current federal funding system isn’t working. Costs keep rising, and with the gas tax flat, spending power keeps dropping. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees about what to do.

Some want to find more sustainable revenue sources, and use them to build multimodal 21st Century infrastructure. Others want to eliminate multimodal programs and focus on spending limited money on what they see as the most important priority, highways.

This bill is a compromise. It puts off the larger questions of our country’s long term needs, and takes a slight regressive lean, in order to continue for 2 more years the overall status quo of an 18.3¢ tax going to an 80/20 highway/transit split.

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

A Ride-On bus in Gaithersburg. Not BRT.

A report is making the rounds today that claims the Corridor Cities Transitway BRT line could be built for far less money if buses were routed in mixed traffic rather than on a transitway, if “temporary stops” were built instead of stations, and if park and rides were eliminated from the outer stations.

The report is wrong in one very fundamental way: It is impossible to build a bus rapid transit Corridor Cities Transitway for the amount of money they claim.

What *is* possible is to build something so entirely different from the Corridor Cities Transitway that you couldn’t call it the same thing.

It is totally possible to build a non-rapid, non-transitway bus route for a lot less money. And, in doing so, provide a vastly inferior product that would be vastly less convenient, and which would serve vastly fewer passengers.

The report’s authors claim that their redesign wouldn’t slow buses all that much, but they completely miss the point that ride quality also matters. Eliminating stations in favor of normal bus stops and taking away park and rides might not technically slow buses down, but it would certainly affect ridership.

If highway engineers eliminated the exits from an Interstate highway and replaced them with stop lights, the resulting road wouldn’t be an Interstate highway. That’s essentially what is being proposed here. The changes look small on paper, but they add up to big reductions in quality.

Montgomery County currently operates about 100 Ride-On bus routes. They could easily add a new Route 101, have it run on existing streets along the Corridor Cities Transitway alignment, and call it a day. Doing that would save a lot of money, but it wouldn’t be providing bus rapid transit.

It’s a bit of a straw man to claim the authors of this report want to go that far, but only a bit. Their proposal would strip the CCT of so many of the amenities that separate it from a normal bus route that functionally, it may as well be one. We’d be left with something that looks a lot like MetroExtra; a little better than local buses, but not BRT.

The real kick to the knees here is that anyone who has followed transit development over the last decade could have predicted this. Stripping BRT projects of their amenities is called BRT creep (and here at GGW), and it happens so often that it’s probably inherent to BRT projects.

The good news is that the Montgomery County Council appears to recognize what a terrible idea this is. Councilwoman Nancy Floreen says “I don’t think we want to do the CCT on the cheap … We want to make this as close to a light rail experience as we can.” Councilman Phil Andrews says the proposal “subjects riders to the same traffic that we want to get them out of.”

But sticking to those guns is going to take a lot of political will, over a long and sustained time. It’s going to take years for the CCT to be built, and this is already the second time the news media has picked up on opponents’ proposal to redefine it as a non-BRT line. Presumably they will continue, and the threat of BRT creep will be with the CCT until the day it opens (and maybe after).

Barcelona image from SanFranciscoize.

Bus bulbs are a simple and effective way to speed up bus service. The basic idea is that rather than forcing buses to pull out of travel lanes for bus stops, and then make them wait for an opening in traffic before pulling back in when they’re ready to leave, you simply have buses stop in the travel lane, and extend the sidewalk out to the street.

Here is a simple diagram illustrating the concept, and here is a real world example from Russia.

Sidewalks extensions are relatively cheap and easy to build compared to many other things. Nonetheless, it takes months of planning and a fair amount of funding for public agencies to do them. Plus, of course, there’s the accompanying disruption that comes with construction.

The attached image shows an easier, cheaper, and faster alternative. It’s a pre-fab unit installed in Barcelona, Spain. It accomplishes all the same goals as a regular sidewalk extension would, but is easier in just about every way.

Without having actually used one of these or seen one up close, the major downside appears to be that the pre-fab unit isn’t as pretty as a real sidewalk. It looks a little bit cheap and tacked on. Which of course it is; that’s the idea.

Would we want these on Pennsylvania Avenue or in front of the White House? Probably not. But they might very well be a reasonable way to make transit improvements on less monumental streets.

Coming soon: More blue buses.

On June 17, WMATA will roll out its biggest set of enhancements to bus service in years. It will expand the limited-stop MetroExtra service, add capacity to the most crowded routes, and adjust schedules to reduce bus bunching. These changes will significantly improve service for many riders.

The most visible change will be that the Metrobus Express brand will disappear, to be replaced completely by MetroExtra.

Other major improvements will include new local and MetroExpress routes, more articulated “accordion” buses on the 16th Street line, increased service on several busy routes, and restructuring of the Georgia Avenue line to follow a headway-based schedule. WMATA has released a complete list of the changes.

MetroExtra

All of Metro’s limited-stop bus services will now be called MetroExtra instead of Metrobus Express, although buses painted with the Metrobus Express scheme won’t be repainted right away.

It was always a little bit silly for Metro to have two competing brands for similar limited-stop services, so rebranding them all under one banner makes a lot of sense. WMATA picked MetroExtra as the name to keep because in bus parlance “express” usually means a route that either runs along a freeway, or that doesn’t stop at all between two far apart points. Routes that have widely-spaced stops like the 39 and S9 aren’t technically express routes; rather, they’re “limited-stop”. Meanwhile some bus routes that are more legitimately expresses, such as the 5A to Dulles Airport, weren’t branded as part of Metrobus Express.

The old system was needlessly confusing, and the new one will be clear. It’s a good move.

Beyond the rebranding, there are several MetroExtra-related service improvements coming as well. Wisconsin Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, and 16th Street will all see additional MetroExtra buses, as routes 37, 39, and S9 are expanded. There will also be more buses running on Leesburg Pike’s limited-stop 28X. Finally, new limited routes will begin operation along Chain Bridge Road as an alternate 15L, and between Pentagon and Rosslyn as extensions to the 9E and 10E.

The 28X will be fully rebranded as MetroExtra sometime this fall, when a second round of MetroExtra improvements is scheduled to hit. When that happens, MLK Avenue’s A9 route and Columbia Pike’s 16F and 16Y routes will also be converted to the MetroExtra brand.

All in all, there are going to be a lot more blue buses on the road.

Georgia Avenue line

Changes coming to routes 70 and 79 won’t be so obviously visible, but they could be more profound from an operational standpoint. For these routes, Metro will be shifting to headway-based scheduling, which means that rather than trying to have buses stick to set arrival and departure times, dispatchers will try to keep all the active buses along the corridor about the same distance apart from one another.

The idea is that trying to keep to a timed schedule is a lost cause, and it’s better for riders if a bus comes regularly every 12 minutes than for a half hour to go by and then have 3 buses all come at the same time.

This is how DC Circulator works, which is why there’s no such thing as a Circulator timetable, and also why it’s rare to see multiple Circulators from the same line bunched together.

This will be WMATA’s first second experiment with headway scheduling. Theoretically this change should make riding the 70 and 79 much more predictable. It will be harder for a route as long as the 70 than it is for Circulator, but it’s a worthy experiment.

WMATA has been using headway scheduling on the 90 and 92 since September, 2011. Director of Communications Dan Stessel reports that it has worked quite well. On time performance has increased by 15-20%.

16th Street line

The S-series buses are among the most overcrowded in WMATA’s entire network. I personally ride them for my commute, and most mornings I have to wait for 2 or 3 to pass by full before one with open capacity comes along. One rainy morning I literally counted 10 full buses pass me by. So I am personally very, very excited about the increased capacity WMATA will be adding to this corridor.

And it will be a lot of new capacity.

First, the MetroExtra route S9 will be getting additional service, as previously indicated. Limited stop buses will run every 7-8 minutes instead of the current every 10. These additional runs will be new buses, not buses cannibalized from the S1, S2, or S4, meaning they are 100% new capacity for 16th Street.

In addition to being convenient for longer-distance riders, this should also have a positive effect on bus bunching. Since S9s stop less often than other S-series buses, they bunch less. That means the more riders WMATA can shift to the S9, the less of a problem bunching should be along the whole corridor.

Secondly, more articulated buses will be put to use on the S1, increasing capacity for local riders. Because of space constraints at WMATA’s Northern Division bus storage facility, there are only about 30 articulated buses available for use on routes serving Mid-City. Among those 30, the busy Georgia Avenue line gets first priority. Historically, whatever articulated buses Georgia Avenue didn’t use were kept in reserve, but now as many as possible will be made available for 16th Street. The number of articulated buses on S1 runs on any given day will vary, but it’s going to be more than now.

One reduction planned for 16th Street is that weekday midday S4 trips will terminate at Franklin Square instead of going all the way to Federal Triangle. Except for this, S2 and S4 service won’t be modified.

Other changes

Although MetroExtra, Georgia Avenue, and 16th Street are the biggest winners, several other routes benefit as well. The G8 and W4 will have additional buses, shortening waits and relieving crowding. Schedule and route adjustments are planned for dozens of other routes, including the F, L, P, Q, R, and Y series.

Unfortunately, all of this comes at a cost. Although WMATA is pumping a lot of new money into Metrobus, and working to squeeze additional efficiencies out of the reserve bus fleet, such a major restructuring inevitably also includes service reductions. The changes coming will result in better bus service for more people overall, but some specific lower-ridership routes will see service decline.

Reductions of one kind or another will come to the 74, D3, D6, 3T, and 22A, as well as to riders on some of the restructured F, L, P, Q, R, and Y-series buses.

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

Seven Corners bus service sign.

One of the biggest problems with riding the bus is that bus routes are often hugely complicated. There are hundreds of criss-crossing routes all over the region, with hard-to-remember, non-descriptive names like “16Y” and “X2″. Even within individual corridors service patterns are often hopelessly complex, with several similarly-named routes all generally parallel to one another, but all following slightly different routes.

It’s a nightmare for riders, and it’s one of the big reasons why many people are comfortable taking Metrorail, but are intimidated by the bus. It’s also one of the big reasons why DC Circulator, with its small number of easy to understand routes, is often preferred over Metrobus.

But what can a big transit agency like WMATA do? Obviously eliminating most of their routes in order to show a simple map would not be productive.

One thing they can do is to call out the most frequent or highly-used bus routes with a special map or branding scheme. For example, Los Angeles produces a 15 minute map that only shows the most frequent routes. Another example is Boulder, Colorado, which gives each of its most important bus routes a unique name and paint scheme, rather than a number. They have buses named the Skip, the Dash, the Jump, and a few others.

But while those strategies are good for highlighting the most important routes, they don’t solve the problem of helping riders understand all the different variations between several smaller routes along the same corridor. For that, there’s no substitute for plain old strong wayfinding.

Recently I traveled via bus to Seven Corners, Virginia. Seven Corners has a brand new bus depot, which just opened in January of this year. It serves the Route 50 line, which is one of the most difficult to comprehend lines in the region. Between the “1 series” of routes and the “4 series, ” there are at least 8 individual bus routes that follow this corridor and which stop at Seven Corners depot. It’s very difficult to keep them straight.

So WMATA designed and installed the sign pictured at right, which makes the whole network infinitely easier to understand by showing each route variation independently. It’s much more useful than the typical geographic map shown at many stations, in which individual routes are difficult to follow.

This is a nice, easy thing to do that can make a dramatic difference to riders. Hopefully WMATA will install similar maps along all its complicated bus lines.

It’s been a crazy busy week for me. Late nights at work, meetings, etc. Thus the empty blog. In fact, I’m in a meeting right now. But there’s a break; I’m not needed for a few minutes, so how about tossing something easy/fun up. It’s Friday, after all.

These are model buses, constructed of 5 pieces of foamcore glued together, with a paper cutout of a bus on the side – in this case, Fairfax City’s CUE bus.

If you don’t think these are fun, I’m not sure we can be friends.