Curitiba BRT station. Photo by whl.travel.

Can the US make Bus Rapid Transit work as well as Latin America? Tanya Snyder asks that question in a post on GGW and Streetsblog.

BRT systems in places like Bogota and Curitiba have narrowed the gap between bus and rail, producing BRT lines nearly as good as subways. If they produce such great BRT, why should American BRT be considered the little sister of rail?

The answer is something I call “BRT creep”. Putting aside the inherent differences between bus and rail, one of the big problems I see with BRT is that it’s too easy to strip down. There are too many corners you can cut that save a lot of money and only degrade service a little bit. You put your BRT in HOV lanes or regular travel lanes instead of dedicated lanes, or you build “stops” rather than more luxurious “stations”, or you leave out pre-pay, or you don’t give buses signal priority, or you don’t give your BRT unique branding, or whatever. There are a thousand corners like that you can cut that individually may or may not hurt too much, but collectively add up to the difference between BRT and a regular bus.

In the US, BRT creep is a big problem. Generally speaking the main reason American cities opt to build BRT instead of rail is to cut a corner and make it less expensive. Once you’ve adopted that view of your transit system – that cutting corners to save money is OK – it’s too easy to keep going and cut a lot of other corners as well. Once you’ve made the decision to cheap out and go with BRT rather than rail, then your priorities are clear and the temptation to cheap out in other ways is too strong to pass up.

It happens all the time. The four leading examples of recently-built BRT in the United States are in Boston, Cleveland, Eugene, and Los Angeles. Boston’s Silver Line BRT was built with curbside bus lanes like the one on 7th Street in DC, and is perpetually stuck behind car traffic using the lane illegally. Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue BRT spends half its time stopped at red lights because it doesn’t include signal preemption. Eugene’s EmX BRT doesn’t even have its own lane for much of its route. LA’s San Fernando Valley Orange Line BRT is probably this country’s most successful “rail like” bus line, but even it was forced to repave its running way after barely a year of operation because the originally-constructed running way was substandard. So far, every example of BRT built in the United States has cut at least one extremely damaging corner.

And then there’s Northern Virginia, where the HOV lanes on I-395 and I-95 that the state wants to convert to HOT lanes were originally built as a bus-only facility. Here, we built a pretty good busway and have spent the years since opening it up to more and more use by cars.

And why not? After all, if your goal is to substitute a less expensive but less effective alternate mode, why should anyone be surprised when you make the same sort of substitution when it comes to details of running way engineering or signalization? If BRT is just a way to avoid spending a lot on transit so more can go to highways, why be surprised when BRT lanes are converted to car lanes? If decision makers were actually interested in spending the money to produce a transit line as good as rail, well, why not build rail?

I don’t mean to suggest that BRT alone suffers from these problems, or that it’s useless. Certainly rail projects can suffer from creeping cost reductions as well, and certainly good buses – including rapid ones – should be a part of every major transit system. My point is merely that as long as US planners think of BRT as a cheap replacement for rail, then the US will be very unlikely to ever produce BRT that is actually rail-like (as much as it can be anyway), because that mindset inherently undervalues many of the specific features that are needed to produce a high-quality transit line, regardless of mode.

From Failblog, and probably photoshopped:

DC rowhouse print for sale at the Temporium.

Have you ever looked at a storefront that’s been empty a long time and wondered why it couldn’t be filled, at least temporarily, by a small local business?

After all, nobody benefits when a storefront sits empty too long. The property owner isn’t making any money, potential businesspeople aren’t operating their business, and neighborhood residents have fewer shopping options and have to travel farther for them.

Unfortunately, it’s common practice for property owners to charge such high rents that it can take a long time to find a tenant. Months, even years sometimes. This is especially true for new buildings, and for buildings developed by large-scale corporations (which can eat the losses from an empty lease if they need to).

Amidst all those empty storefronts, however, are hundreds of small local businesses that would love to occupy a retail space, but can’t afford the asking prices for a lease in a good location.

Why not let small businesses use some of these spaces on a short-term basis at reduced rent, while deals with longer-term, higher-paying tenants are being sought and worked out?

Actually, there’s no real reason why not. That’s exactly the premise behind the Mount Pleasant Temporium, a pop-up retail store selling goods from 30-some local businesses that don’t have stores of their own.

The Temporium is a project by the DC Temporary Urbanism Initiative, which seeks to promote economic development, incubate local businesses, and activate underused commercial properties. It’s an absolutely fabulous idea that benefits just about everyone, and should be emulated across the city.

The Temporium is at 3068 Mt. Pleasant Street and is open 2-7pm M-F and 11-5 weekends, until March 13.

GGW has an interesting post up debunking the nonsense floating around some circles these days that increased focus on transit and cycling somehow represents a “war on cars”. I’ll let GGW provide its own excellent tl;dr version:

“These two pie charts, one from Transit Miami in 2009 and one from Streetsblog yesterday, tell it all… Few scream more loudly than an interest group used to getting the entire pie.”

There is no war on cars. The only war going on is one by the highway lobby against all other modes. The only people who want to take away your freedom are the people who want to require everyone to drive everywhere for everything.

Germantown’s landmark giant globe may be repainted.

I haven’t had much time for blogging this week, and today is busy too. But there’s a lot of Montgomery County news today, so let’s just shoot through it real quick like.

• The Montgomery County Fairgrounds are considering possible redevelopment scenarios with the City of Gaithersburg. The fairgrounds are smack in the middle of everything, within walking distance to stations on the MARC line and the future Corridor Cities Transitway, and right up against I-270. The redevelopment scenarios aren’t actual proposals, just illustrations of what could happen.
• County Executive Isiah Leggett – essentially the mayor of Montgomery County – has formed a transit task force charged with studying how to best advance bus and train projects in the county.
• Speaking of bus projects in the county, MTA’s new ICC bus routes are now running. There are two routes starting in Gaithersburg. One ends at Fort Meade and the other at BWI. Rides are free through March 14.
• A water tank in Germantown that’s painted like a giant world globe and is visible from miles away may be repainted. Officials haven’t decided yet whether to keep the tank a globe or to give it a different look, such as that of a baseball.
• Developers want to build a 75-foot-tall apartment building in downtown Kensington near the MARC station. The area has a 60-foot height limit, but the developers say they can’t make the project work without 15 more feet.
• Preparations are underway for construction at Lot 31 in downtown Bethesda, the large surface parking lot adjacent to Barnes and Noble on Woodmont Avenue. The parking lot will be replaced by an underground public parking garage with mixed-use buildings on top.

The ICC is open, and while it may have been a questionable project, it is certainly one of the largest new pieces of transportation infrastructure to be constructed in the region in recent years. That in mind, I had a friend pick me up at Shady Grove Metro and drive me down the new megahighway to its temporary end at Norbeck Road. After that, we turned around and came back. The pictures I took down both lengths of the ICC are available in the slideshow below, or with expanded commentary in a thread at SkyscraperPage forum.