A shoulder bus lane in Minneapolis

Now this is the kind of Bus Rapid Transit system we can wholeheartedly support.

WMATA chairman Chris Zimmerman’s proposal to allow buses to use roadway shoulders as exclusive lanes during periods of heavy traffic is absolutely inspired. It could markedly improve bus service on 100 miles of our region’s largest roads, it costs virtually nothing since it uses infrastructure already in place, and it’s not being billed as anything it can’t be (like the equivalent of rail). It is, in short, an easy thing we can do to make sure buses don’t have to sit with cars in traffic jams.

Ron Kirby, director of transportation at MWCOG (and a guy with whom BeyondDC usually agrees), doesn’t think the idea is worthwhile because the benefits would be relatively modest. He says not all shoulders are wide or strong enough, and even those that are would generally only be safe for marginally higher speeds than clogged traffic.

But see, the fact that this is a marginal benefit is kind of the point. Zimmerman isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, he’s just trying to do what he can to make what we’ve got better, for virtually no cost. This is one of a multitude of little things that we can do to make transit service just a little bit better. And why shouldn’t we? A slight benefit is better than no benefit, and if you manage to string together a bunch of slight benefits, pretty soon you’re making a major difference. This sort of thinking is exactly the reason WMATA brought CEO John Catoe to Washington from Los Angeles. Under his stewardship LA made a lot of improvements like this to its bus system, and they increased efficiency by a pretty whopping 25%.

BeyondDC has long maintained that BRT can be a valuable way to “do buses right”, as long as it’s not used as an excuse to stop building rail. This proposal gets it exactly right.