The Williamsburg Bridge is the other bridge that still carries heavy rail across the East River. It has four lanes of car/bus/truck traffic in each direction, and two pedestrian/bike paths that merge at the Manhattan end. There is currently only one bus that crosses the bridge, the B30, which is essentially a shuttle between Williamsburg Bridge Plaza and the western end of Delancey Street. At Williamsburg Bridge Plaza there is a bus terminal where five other bus lines meet up with the B30. There are also various private buses that cross the bridge. To my knowledge, there are no express buses.
If there were a reliable BRT corridor in Manhattan, the five bus lines could definitely be extended west across the bridge. On the Williamsburg side there are not very many suitable corridors for BRT. The only high-volume one is the short highway connecting the bridge to the BQE, but that could be used to bring buses from Queens to Lower Manhattan. The next largest corridor is Roebling Street, which is four lanes south of the Bridge, but only for three blocks, and then it connects to a number of two-lane streets.
On the Manhattan side of the bridge there are a number of streets - Delancey, Allen, Chrystie and Forsyth - that are way too wide for the amount of traffic they see, and are dangerous at that width. Perfect for the traffic calming effects of xRT. Going north, buses can connect to the First/Second Avenue BRT. Going south is a little more difficult, because the big streets don't actually lead to Lower Manhattan, where the jobs are. They just end at the FDR Drive. This is the same problem that the First/Second Avenue BRT is facing, though, and they're probably planning to take over the roadway under the Drive for a busway, so the buses coming off the Williamsburg Bridge can use that.
However, there is another option: the invaluable James Brennan has a page about the abandoned trolley station under Delancey Street. Some of it can be seen from the platforms of the Essex Street subway station, but he's got pictures. This is a perfect place for bus passengers to transfer to uptown F trains or downtown J, M and Z trains.
Here's the best part: the buses don't all have to stop there. The NYCSubway.org Downtown Track Map (261MB PNG file) shows that there are two unused trackbeds running from that station almost to Chambers Street, that could even be hooked up to buses coming off the Manhattan Bridge. If the tracks were re-aligned so that the subway trains only used the two westernmost platforms at Chambers Street (the M would have to terminate at Broad Street instead of Chambers), then the buses could turn around there. Isn't that fantastic?
There is also the possibility of through-running buses onto the Brooklyn Bridge from that point, just as the trolleys did on the old loop. The northbound buses can be through-run wherever the First/Second Avenue busway goes, but through-running to New Jersey through the Holland Tunnel doesn't seem very promising, because of the number of narrow streets.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Boondoggles: the New Jersey Turnpike Widening
The Tri-State Transportation Campaign has a great post about how the New Jersey Turnpike Authority is still trying to widen the turnpike, even though traffic volumes have been going down. Another one for the list of boondoggles.
Bridge xRT: The Queensboro Bridge
Sorry to skip over the Williamsburgh Bridge and the Midtown Tunnel, but I'll come back to them. The Queensborough Bridge is near to my home and my heart. I often take one or another of the three local buses that cross it, the Q32, the Q60 and the Q101. I also take the five local buses that terminate at Queensboro Plaza, just before the bridge; many of them will drop you right at the stairs for the E train. I haven't taken any of the 21 express buses that make a loop through the Midtown Tunnel, up Third or Sixth Avenue, and over the bridge, but I see them on Queens Boulevard all the time.
The main problem with the eight local buses is that they get stuck in traffic. In the morning rush, they can really crawl along Van Dam Street, Queens Boulevard and Northern Boulevard. PlaNYC included dedicated bus lanes on Queens Boulevard to speed these buses through; that went more or less nowhere, sadly. But if we got these bus lanes, what would happen to the buses on the other side?
Well, the Q32 goes all the way down Fifth Avenue to Penn Station. It's also notoriously unreliable; it won the Pokey Award for Queens in 2003. If it gets rerouted to the planned 34th Street Busway, that will speed things up a bit. Physically separating the lanes on Fifth and Madison Avenues could help as well.
The Q60 and Q101 get to the other side of the bridge and turn right around. The Q60 lays up on the block of 60th Street just north of the bridge, and the Q101 stops on Second Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets, and then goes onto the upper level via 57th Street. If we sent the other buses over the bridge, or increased the frequencies of the Q60 or Q101, where would they turn around?
Well, it turns out there's a place. Joseph Brennan has a page with old photos of the trolley terminal under the western end of the bridge. Trolleys used to turn around there, and people would get out and transfer to the Second Avenue El.
Since then, the kiosks where they used to come out of the ground have been hit several times by speeding cars. One is surrounded by cast-iron fencing, the only way to protect it. I don't recommend reopening these kiosks here, but a tunnel could be dug under Second Avenue, allowing people to transfer to the downtown M15, and eventually the Second Avenue BRT. Another possibility would be to have a ramp allowing buses to connect directly to the Second Avenue BRT without getting stuck in traffic; you could have a similar ramp for northbound buses from First Avenue.
Of course, the ideal connection would be with the Second Avenue Subway. Sadly, nobody thought of that, and the current plans are to have stops at 72nd and 55th Streets. Since it's going to be years before any of that is going to be dug, let's stick a stop in at 62nd Street, and move the 55th Street one down to 52nd.
The main problem with the eight local buses is that they get stuck in traffic. In the morning rush, they can really crawl along Van Dam Street, Queens Boulevard and Northern Boulevard. PlaNYC included dedicated bus lanes on Queens Boulevard to speed these buses through; that went more or less nowhere, sadly. But if we got these bus lanes, what would happen to the buses on the other side?
Well, the Q32 goes all the way down Fifth Avenue to Penn Station. It's also notoriously unreliable; it won the Pokey Award for Queens in 2003. If it gets rerouted to the planned 34th Street Busway, that will speed things up a bit. Physically separating the lanes on Fifth and Madison Avenues could help as well.
The Q60 and Q101 get to the other side of the bridge and turn right around. The Q60 lays up on the block of 60th Street just north of the bridge, and the Q101 stops on Second Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets, and then goes onto the upper level via 57th Street. If we sent the other buses over the bridge, or increased the frequencies of the Q60 or Q101, where would they turn around?
Well, it turns out there's a place. Joseph Brennan has a page with old photos of the trolley terminal under the western end of the bridge. Trolleys used to turn around there, and people would get out and transfer to the Second Avenue El.
Since then, the kiosks where they used to come out of the ground have been hit several times by speeding cars. One is surrounded by cast-iron fencing, the only way to protect it. I don't recommend reopening these kiosks here, but a tunnel could be dug under Second Avenue, allowing people to transfer to the downtown M15, and eventually the Second Avenue BRT. Another possibility would be to have a ramp allowing buses to connect directly to the Second Avenue BRT without getting stuck in traffic; you could have a similar ramp for northbound buses from First Avenue.
Of course, the ideal connection would be with the Second Avenue Subway. Sadly, nobody thought of that, and the current plans are to have stops at 72nd and 55th Streets. Since it's going to be years before any of that is going to be dug, let's stick a stop in at 62nd Street, and move the 55th Street one down to 52nd.
Monday, May 12, 2008
The Manhattan Bridge, a Transportation Powerhouse
"Powerhouse" is a funny metaphor, but what else can you say about a bridge that still has four subway tracks crossing it? The Manhattan Bridge not only carries the B,D,N and Q trains, but it's also a major truck route from Brooklyn, Staten Island and even New Jersey to Manhattan - and to New Jersey.
There is one path on either side of the bridge. They were both closed during World War II, to prevent spying on the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but somehow the City never got around to reopening them afterward. In the 1980s the bridge was discovered to be deficient, which meant that the subways on both sides were closed for several years. Then the north side (Sixth Avenue) was closed, and then the south side (Broadway). The paths were used as staging areas for the subway reconstruction, so the city did not make them available until 2001. The south/west path is intended primarily for pedestrians, and the north/east path primarily for cyclists.
In 2007, the DOT restricted a single lane to high-occupancy vehicles inbound from 6-10AM weekdays; it's not clear how much of an effect this has had on congestion or bus movements. The only city bus to cross the bridge is the B51, but there are several private buses that use it, primarily serving Chinese and Orthodox Jewish communities.
On the Brooklyn side, much of the traffic congestion on Flatbush Avenue can be blamed on merges for the Manhattan Bridge. It would make sense for buses to have an exclusive route through Downtown Brooklyn, either on Flatbush or on Flushing or Park Avenue.
Much of what I wrote about the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge applies to the Manhattan Bridge, with the main difference being that the Manhattan Bridge points people towards Midtown instead of Downtown. Through-running between Brooklyn and New Jersey would be easy because it's a straight shot across Canal Street (and wasn't there some DOT plan to make Canal Street one-way eastbound?), but you'd have to have a bunch of people who either (a) want to go from Brooklyn to Jersey or (b) want to get off along Canal Street and change to the subway, since there aren't too many destinations along Canal.
People from Brooklyn that aren't going to Lower Manhattan are more likely to be going to Midtown, so the best solution would be to hook up Manhattan Bridge buses to a north-south busway in Manhattan, such as the planned First/Second Avenue BRT.
There is one path on either side of the bridge. They were both closed during World War II, to prevent spying on the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but somehow the City never got around to reopening them afterward. In the 1980s the bridge was discovered to be deficient, which meant that the subways on both sides were closed for several years. Then the north side (Sixth Avenue) was closed, and then the south side (Broadway). The paths were used as staging areas for the subway reconstruction, so the city did not make them available until 2001. The south/west path is intended primarily for pedestrians, and the north/east path primarily for cyclists.
In 2007, the DOT restricted a single lane to high-occupancy vehicles inbound from 6-10AM weekdays; it's not clear how much of an effect this has had on congestion or bus movements. The only city bus to cross the bridge is the B51, but there are several private buses that use it, primarily serving Chinese and Orthodox Jewish communities.
On the Brooklyn side, much of the traffic congestion on Flatbush Avenue can be blamed on merges for the Manhattan Bridge. It would make sense for buses to have an exclusive route through Downtown Brooklyn, either on Flatbush or on Flushing or Park Avenue.
Much of what I wrote about the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge applies to the Manhattan Bridge, with the main difference being that the Manhattan Bridge points people towards Midtown instead of Downtown. Through-running between Brooklyn and New Jersey would be easy because it's a straight shot across Canal Street (and wasn't there some DOT plan to make Canal Street one-way eastbound?), but you'd have to have a bunch of people who either (a) want to go from Brooklyn to Jersey or (b) want to get off along Canal Street and change to the subway, since there aren't too many destinations along Canal.
People from Brooklyn that aren't going to Lower Manhattan are more likely to be going to Midtown, so the best solution would be to hook up Manhattan Bridge buses to a north-south busway in Manhattan, such as the planned First/Second Avenue BRT.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Bridge xRT: Restoring the Glory of the Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge has the distinction of being the only major bridge in the city not designed for cars. It was completed in 1883, two years before Karl Benz built the first passenger car, and 25 years before the Model T Ford. For city dwellers, a private horse-drawn carriage was a definite luxury, and most people crossed the bridge by train, trolley or horsecar. When the bridge opened it had one heavy-rail track, a trolley track, and one lane for carriages, in each direction, plus the pedestrian walkway. In 1944 the BRT (that's Brooklyn Rapid Transit) trains stopped running, and in 1954 the trolleys went out of business, leaving the city to devote six lanes to private cars and taxis.
With the increasing popularity of cycling in the city and in Brooklyn, there is often tension between cyclists and pedestrians on the walkway. The North/East path of the parallel Manhattan Bridge is primarily for cycling, but this does not seem to have reduced demand for the Brooklyn Bridge path.
The bridge currently does not allow commercial traffic or buses. In this post I assume that it is structurally capable of handling bus traffic, since it was designed for heavy rail, but it may have worn out since then. If it turns out that it is not safe for buses, then it should be redesigned to fully accommodate the existing demand among pedestrians and cyclists.
As with the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the Brooklyn Bridge has a transitway that can feed it: the eight-block bus-only Fulton Mall. Five bus lines use the Fulton Mall for most of its length, and five others run on Livingston Street, one block south. These are all local buses connecting to nearby parts of Brooklyn, but some of them go as far as Long Island City, Ridgewood, East New York and Marine Park. Many of the people using these buses come to work in some of the offices, colleges and courthouses of Downtown Brooklyn, but many change for the subway to Manhattan. If we sent some of these buses over the bridge, a lot of them wouldn't have to change.
Between the Fulton Mall and the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge are the three blocks of Adams Street, one of the most over-designed streets in the borough. Adams Street can easily spare two lanes for dedicated busways. Those lanes can be connected to dedicated busways on the bridge itself, using the inner lanes of the roadway just like the old BRT tracks - BRT returns to the Brooklyn Bridge! If we really wanted to get creative, we could dedicate one or both of the outer lanes to bicycles so that pedestrians can have the walkway to themselves.
In Lower Manhattan, just about everything is a block or two from everything else, and if - as described in the previous posts - we've built dedicated busways on Sixth Avenue, West Street and/or the FDR Drive, it's a relatively simple matter to connect them to the Brooklyn Bridge. Many of the local buses that now terminate in Lower Manhattan could go to Downtown Brooklyn, or through-run to spread out destinations in Brooklyn, and vice versa.
At the other end of the Fulton Mall, many buses get stuck in traffic on Flatbush Avenue, which is a real bottleneck. The overall state of bus travel in Brooklyn is not going to get significantly better without removing that bottleneck by dedicating at least one lane of Flatbush in each direction to buses between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue.
So there you have it: to have Bus Rapid Transit over the Brooklyn Bridge, you first have to allow buses on the bridge. Then it's a relatively simple matter of running the Fulton Mall and Livingston Street buses down Adams Street, and figuring out where they go once they get to Manhattan.
Simple, yes. Easy - especially politically? Not so much. But all these posts assume a certain level of political and financial support for BRT. Without that, you're not going to get much BRT anywhere in the city.
With the increasing popularity of cycling in the city and in Brooklyn, there is often tension between cyclists and pedestrians on the walkway. The North/East path of the parallel Manhattan Bridge is primarily for cycling, but this does not seem to have reduced demand for the Brooklyn Bridge path.
The bridge currently does not allow commercial traffic or buses. In this post I assume that it is structurally capable of handling bus traffic, since it was designed for heavy rail, but it may have worn out since then. If it turns out that it is not safe for buses, then it should be redesigned to fully accommodate the existing demand among pedestrians and cyclists.
As with the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the Brooklyn Bridge has a transitway that can feed it: the eight-block bus-only Fulton Mall. Five bus lines use the Fulton Mall for most of its length, and five others run on Livingston Street, one block south. These are all local buses connecting to nearby parts of Brooklyn, but some of them go as far as Long Island City, Ridgewood, East New York and Marine Park. Many of the people using these buses come to work in some of the offices, colleges and courthouses of Downtown Brooklyn, but many change for the subway to Manhattan. If we sent some of these buses over the bridge, a lot of them wouldn't have to change.
Between the Fulton Mall and the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge are the three blocks of Adams Street, one of the most over-designed streets in the borough. Adams Street can easily spare two lanes for dedicated busways. Those lanes can be connected to dedicated busways on the bridge itself, using the inner lanes of the roadway just like the old BRT tracks - BRT returns to the Brooklyn Bridge! If we really wanted to get creative, we could dedicate one or both of the outer lanes to bicycles so that pedestrians can have the walkway to themselves.
In Lower Manhattan, just about everything is a block or two from everything else, and if - as described in the previous posts - we've built dedicated busways on Sixth Avenue, West Street and/or the FDR Drive, it's a relatively simple matter to connect them to the Brooklyn Bridge. Many of the local buses that now terminate in Lower Manhattan could go to Downtown Brooklyn, or through-run to spread out destinations in Brooklyn, and vice versa.
At the other end of the Fulton Mall, many buses get stuck in traffic on Flatbush Avenue, which is a real bottleneck. The overall state of bus travel in Brooklyn is not going to get significantly better without removing that bottleneck by dedicating at least one lane of Flatbush in each direction to buses between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue.
So there you have it: to have Bus Rapid Transit over the Brooklyn Bridge, you first have to allow buses on the bridge. Then it's a relatively simple matter of running the Fulton Mall and Livingston Street buses down Adams Street, and figuring out where they go once they get to Manhattan.
Simple, yes. Easy - especially politically? Not so much. But all these posts assume a certain level of political and financial support for BRT. Without that, you're not going to get much BRT anywhere in the city.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Tunnel xRT: from Brooklyn to the Battery
In my last post, I discussed one way to get rapid-transit value even on non-rapid bus routes, by sending them over bridges and through tunnels. In this post I'm going to focus on the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.
Faithful readers may remember that in an early post I suggested running some buses from Red Hook through this tunnel, to make up for the loss of service when the MTA shuts down the Smith-9th Street station. This suggestion, although not original to me, was taken up by City Council candidate Gary Reilly and some other pro-transit folk in the area. Following on a request from Assemblymember Millman, the MTA included it in the next Capital Plan, and then abruptly cancelled it due to lack of funds. Millman was "deeply disappointed," but did not express her support for congestion pricing to fund it soon enough or strongly enough to persuade her colleagues. She was also unable to prevent the Legislature from cutting $50 million from the MTA budget and giving it to the highway department. Not exactly an auspicious beginning.
In any case, the MTA's Brooklyn bus map (PDF) shows that the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel is already host to the x27 and x37 (to Bay Ridge), x28 and x38 (to Sea Gate) and x29 (to Coney Island) buses. The Staten Island map (PDF) shows that the x1-x20, x31 and x42 buses also pass through the tunnel. The maps don't show it, but the MTA Bus Company schedules show that the ex-Command routes BM1-BM4 to Mill Basin, Canarsie, Sheepshead Bay and Gerritsen Beach also use the tunnel. That's a total of 31 routes that use the tunnel; counting the individual bus runs is left as an exercise for the reader. There are probably private buses and vans that use it too.
The question to ask about bridge or tunnel xRT is what happens on either side of the tunnel? Sure, the buses may go fast in the tunnel, but it's not really BRT if they have to fight with single-occupant cars to get in there. If they just get dumped onto congested city streets on the other side, also not very rapid.
Paul White of Transportation Alternatives interviewed Bay Ridge express bus riders, who described a relatively rapid inbound trip on the Gowanus Expressway HOV lane and through the tunnel. Their main complaint was that the MTA doesn't run enough buses; the second complaint was that there is no southbound HOV lane for the trip home.
Staten Island commuters have expressed similar complaints. The Gowanus HOV lane was upgraded in 2002 from HOV-2 to HOV-3 (in other words, cars with only two people were no longer allowed to use it). According to the Staten Island Advance, they've recently asked for the HOV lane to be extended from the current 6-10AM hours to 5-11AM. This was denied by the State DOT because it would have cost an estimated $640,000 in "overtime" to move the jersey barriers an hour earlier and later. Don't ask me why you'd have people working overtime for something that happens every day; that's the State DOT for you.
But seriously, if there's demand for it to be open from 5-11AM and for the evening commute, why not make it permanent, 24-7? That would eliminate all the costs for moving those jersey barriers.
On the Manhattan side, I owe a lot of my thinking to some of the comments that Alon Levy has made on my blog. He has pointed out that the high capacity of the Lincoln Tunnel XBL is largely due to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which allows buses to drop off their passengers quickly and then either go to a garage or turn around and go back. He also asserted that through-running of trains in Penn Station would allow the 20+ track operation to be condensed to four tracks. This suggests to me that the buses going through the tunnel won't be very rapid if they just get dumped into regular city traffic. In fact, in 2002 the city implemented the Church Street Transitway, eliminating most non-bus traffic, to speed traffic in that area, and in 2007 they installed "bus bulbs" on Broadway.
Where do the buses go from there? Almost all continue north to Midtown, many along the FDR Drive, a few on West Street and some on Sixth Avenue. Again, no exclusive right-of-way, so they get stuck in traffic and the result is that they're not very rapid - although they are express, meaning they don't stop every couple blocks to board passengers. Once they get to Midtown, some turn around and go back, but many park on city streets until the evening rush. At least one Manhattan resident has complained to me about idling buses taking up space and polluting the air.
The first improvement to be made to that system is to extend the Church Street Transitway north to Midtown and establish a parallel southbound one. Or to establish a dedicated right-of-way on the FDR Drive or West Street. That would ensure that the buses don't get stuck in traffic between Downtown and Midtown.
The second improvement is to have someplace for these buses to go. Why not implement through-running of buses? New Jersey Transit reports that it and five private operators all offer service to Lower Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel from points west. Go down to Lower Manhattan in midday and you'll see all these buses waiting to take people back to Jersey. What if they continued on through the tunnel to Brooklyn and Staten Island instead? What if some of the MTA buses went through the tunnel to Jersey? During the congestion pricing debates we heard from a number of people who lived in Brooklyn and worked in New Jersey. These buses could get them to work. If we can make it profitable for the private companies, we could even do it without increasing the MTA budget.
For the buses that go to Midtown, what if they continued on to the Bronx and maybe Queens? These routes used to be run by Liberty Lines and New York Bus Service, but they're all MTA Bus now. There are people who work in the Bronx and live in Brooklyn and vice versa. Through-running also attracts partly overlapping populations, as in the famous scene from The Brother from Another Planet:
To recap: we already have something resembling BRT on the Gowanus and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Let's do the following to make it more BRT-like:
Faithful readers may remember that in an early post I suggested running some buses from Red Hook through this tunnel, to make up for the loss of service when the MTA shuts down the Smith-9th Street station. This suggestion, although not original to me, was taken up by City Council candidate Gary Reilly and some other pro-transit folk in the area. Following on a request from Assemblymember Millman, the MTA included it in the next Capital Plan, and then abruptly cancelled it due to lack of funds. Millman was "deeply disappointed," but did not express her support for congestion pricing to fund it soon enough or strongly enough to persuade her colleagues. She was also unable to prevent the Legislature from cutting $50 million from the MTA budget and giving it to the highway department. Not exactly an auspicious beginning.
In any case, the MTA's Brooklyn bus map (PDF) shows that the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel is already host to the x27 and x37 (to Bay Ridge), x28 and x38 (to Sea Gate) and x29 (to Coney Island) buses. The Staten Island map (PDF) shows that the x1-x20, x31 and x42 buses also pass through the tunnel. The maps don't show it, but the MTA Bus Company schedules show that the ex-Command routes BM1-BM4 to Mill Basin, Canarsie, Sheepshead Bay and Gerritsen Beach also use the tunnel. That's a total of 31 routes that use the tunnel; counting the individual bus runs is left as an exercise for the reader. There are probably private buses and vans that use it too.
The question to ask about bridge or tunnel xRT is what happens on either side of the tunnel? Sure, the buses may go fast in the tunnel, but it's not really BRT if they have to fight with single-occupant cars to get in there. If they just get dumped onto congested city streets on the other side, also not very rapid.
Paul White of Transportation Alternatives interviewed Bay Ridge express bus riders, who described a relatively rapid inbound trip on the Gowanus Expressway HOV lane and through the tunnel. Their main complaint was that the MTA doesn't run enough buses; the second complaint was that there is no southbound HOV lane for the trip home.
Staten Island commuters have expressed similar complaints. The Gowanus HOV lane was upgraded in 2002 from HOV-2 to HOV-3 (in other words, cars with only two people were no longer allowed to use it). According to the Staten Island Advance, they've recently asked for the HOV lane to be extended from the current 6-10AM hours to 5-11AM. This was denied by the State DOT because it would have cost an estimated $640,000 in "overtime" to move the jersey barriers an hour earlier and later. Don't ask me why you'd have people working overtime for something that happens every day; that's the State DOT for you.
But seriously, if there's demand for it to be open from 5-11AM and for the evening commute, why not make it permanent, 24-7? That would eliminate all the costs for moving those jersey barriers.
On the Manhattan side, I owe a lot of my thinking to some of the comments that Alon Levy has made on my blog. He has pointed out that the high capacity of the Lincoln Tunnel XBL is largely due to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which allows buses to drop off their passengers quickly and then either go to a garage or turn around and go back. He also asserted that through-running of trains in Penn Station would allow the 20+ track operation to be condensed to four tracks. This suggests to me that the buses going through the tunnel won't be very rapid if they just get dumped into regular city traffic. In fact, in 2002 the city implemented the Church Street Transitway, eliminating most non-bus traffic, to speed traffic in that area, and in 2007 they installed "bus bulbs" on Broadway.
Where do the buses go from there? Almost all continue north to Midtown, many along the FDR Drive, a few on West Street and some on Sixth Avenue. Again, no exclusive right-of-way, so they get stuck in traffic and the result is that they're not very rapid - although they are express, meaning they don't stop every couple blocks to board passengers. Once they get to Midtown, some turn around and go back, but many park on city streets until the evening rush. At least one Manhattan resident has complained to me about idling buses taking up space and polluting the air.
The first improvement to be made to that system is to extend the Church Street Transitway north to Midtown and establish a parallel southbound one. Or to establish a dedicated right-of-way on the FDR Drive or West Street. That would ensure that the buses don't get stuck in traffic between Downtown and Midtown.
The second improvement is to have someplace for these buses to go. Why not implement through-running of buses? New Jersey Transit reports that it and five private operators all offer service to Lower Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel from points west. Go down to Lower Manhattan in midday and you'll see all these buses waiting to take people back to Jersey. What if they continued on through the tunnel to Brooklyn and Staten Island instead? What if some of the MTA buses went through the tunnel to Jersey? During the congestion pricing debates we heard from a number of people who lived in Brooklyn and worked in New Jersey. These buses could get them to work. If we can make it profitable for the private companies, we could even do it without increasing the MTA budget.
For the buses that go to Midtown, what if they continued on to the Bronx and maybe Queens? These routes used to be run by Liberty Lines and New York Bus Service, but they're all MTA Bus now. There are people who work in the Bronx and live in Brooklyn and vice versa. Through-running also attracts partly overlapping populations, as in the famous scene from The Brother from Another Planet:
Card Trickster: I have another magic trick for you. Wanna see me make all the white people disappear?
Subway Public Address Announcer: Fifty-Ninth Street, Columbus Circle; 125th Street next. This an Uptown A Express going to 207. Change for the AA local across the platform, the D, or the upper level, change for the number 1 Broadway trains.
Card Trickster: See, what'd I tell ya?
Subway Public Address Announcer: Uptown A, 125th street, next.
To recap: we already have something resembling BRT on the Gowanus and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Let's do the following to make it more BRT-like:
- Make the Gowanus HOV lane two-way and 24/7
- Run more buses
- Extend the Church Street Transitway north, and institute a parallel southbound route
- Institute through-running of buses to New Jersey and the Bronx
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Piecemeal
Okay, BRT is a collection of bus improvements, right? I can see why you'd want to pacakage your bus improvements together, if (a) you're building a whole new system and can't afford subways, or if (b) buses have such an image problem and you need to convince opinion leaders that no, this bus is full of people like you, not old and retarded people.
This is New York, though, where people will ride the buses, and if the buses are better, more people will ride them. Why do we need to package the bus improvements? Especially when finding a good BRT corridor can be a challenge, let's just stick the improvements in where we can and have done.
To refresh your memory, here are the major bus improvements that make up BRT: dedicated rights-of-way, signal priority, pre-payment, right-of-way enforcement. The most important for speed is the dedicated right-of-way. What I'm talking about in this post is putting in dedicated rights-of-way where we can, to speed up the existing bus routes.
The main point I want to make in this post is that buses can be made "rapid" for a short length of their route, speeding up commutes and adding capacity, even if the rapid section isn't long enough to justify calling the entire route "BRT." In fact, the rapid section can be shared by many bus routes.
It's well-known that the biggest transportation bottlenecks in the region are at the river crossings. This leads us right to one of my favorite charts of all time, courtesy of the Federal Highway Administration:
That graph is a bit out of date; this data from nycroads.com shows recent annual average daily traffic figures. The table below is the number of vehicles; You need to multiply it by a certain number, and add subway trips for the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, to get the total number of people.
The graph and table show that the capacity of the four city-owned East River bridges actually declined from a peak early in the century. Why? Because the city actually removed seventeen tracks from the bridges to make room for car lanes.
To be fair, there were actually eighteen tracks (in subway tunnels with higher capacity) added as these tracks were being removed, resulting in a net gain in capacity. If you add in the four tunnels leading into Penn Station, that's even more. These tunnels led to a significant short-term drop in ridership for the private companies operating trains and trolleys over the bridges (and ferry operators as well) and many of them went out of business or abandoned some of their tracks. The city government, believing cars to be the transportation of the future, turned the rights-of-way over to them rather than railbanking them for companies that might come one day.
Well, the time for cars has come and gone, and now we need that capacity back. We don't have the money to build new subways or elevated trains to connect to these bridges, but we can run more buses (and maybe eventually trolleys again) over the bridges.
The Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane (PDF) is one of the best demonstrations of bus capacity outperforming private cars. This single lane carries 62,000 passengers from 6:15 to 10:00 AM every weekday, in more than 1,700 buses, from the Turnpike Interchange through the Lincoln Tunnel to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. In other words, over the course of three hours and 45 minutes this single lane transports about as many people as the four-lane Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel does in 24 hours. It's currently at capacity, and the Port Authority is looking at ways to expand it.
What if we had an XBL on every major bridge and tunnel? We could take all the buses that pass nearby and feed them through it, bringing people into Manhattan where they can get to jobs easier. This would be a form of BRT, even if it doesn't have fancy brands or fake subway stations. I would argue that it would be much more effective than implementing BRT over long routes. This is not a criticism of the DOT or the MTA, because they're actually doing this - or talking about it.
I'll write a few posts about the various bridges and tunnels involved, and what the plans are to increase bus capacity.
In response to an earlier BRT post, Alon Levy commented that "the XBL works only because it feeds directly into a gigantic terminal." So I'll also talk about what can be done to speed the buses once they get across the bridges and tunnels, too.
This is New York, though, where people will ride the buses, and if the buses are better, more people will ride them. Why do we need to package the bus improvements? Especially when finding a good BRT corridor can be a challenge, let's just stick the improvements in where we can and have done.
To refresh your memory, here are the major bus improvements that make up BRT: dedicated rights-of-way, signal priority, pre-payment, right-of-way enforcement. The most important for speed is the dedicated right-of-way. What I'm talking about in this post is putting in dedicated rights-of-way where we can, to speed up the existing bus routes.
The main point I want to make in this post is that buses can be made "rapid" for a short length of their route, speeding up commutes and adding capacity, even if the rapid section isn't long enough to justify calling the entire route "BRT." In fact, the rapid section can be shared by many bus routes.
It's well-known that the biggest transportation bottlenecks in the region are at the river crossings. This leads us right to one of my favorite charts of all time, courtesy of the Federal Highway Administration:
That graph is a bit out of date; this data from nycroads.com shows recent annual average daily traffic figures. The table below is the number of vehicles; You need to multiply it by a certain number, and add subway trips for the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, to get the total number of people.
| Crossing | AADT |
|---|---|
| Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel | 60,000 |
| Brooklyn Bridge | 145,000 |
| Manhattan Bridge | 150,000 |
| Williamsburg Bridge | 140,000 |
| Queens-Midtown Tunnel | 80,000 |
| Queensboro Bridge | 200,000 |
The graph and table show that the capacity of the four city-owned East River bridges actually declined from a peak early in the century. Why? Because the city actually removed seventeen tracks from the bridges to make room for car lanes.
To be fair, there were actually eighteen tracks (in subway tunnels with higher capacity) added as these tracks were being removed, resulting in a net gain in capacity. If you add in the four tunnels leading into Penn Station, that's even more. These tunnels led to a significant short-term drop in ridership for the private companies operating trains and trolleys over the bridges (and ferry operators as well) and many of them went out of business or abandoned some of their tracks. The city government, believing cars to be the transportation of the future, turned the rights-of-way over to them rather than railbanking them for companies that might come one day.
Well, the time for cars has come and gone, and now we need that capacity back. We don't have the money to build new subways or elevated trains to connect to these bridges, but we can run more buses (and maybe eventually trolleys again) over the bridges.
The Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane (PDF) is one of the best demonstrations of bus capacity outperforming private cars. This single lane carries 62,000 passengers from 6:15 to 10:00 AM every weekday, in more than 1,700 buses, from the Turnpike Interchange through the Lincoln Tunnel to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. In other words, over the course of three hours and 45 minutes this single lane transports about as many people as the four-lane Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel does in 24 hours. It's currently at capacity, and the Port Authority is looking at ways to expand it.
What if we had an XBL on every major bridge and tunnel? We could take all the buses that pass nearby and feed them through it, bringing people into Manhattan where they can get to jobs easier. This would be a form of BRT, even if it doesn't have fancy brands or fake subway stations. I would argue that it would be much more effective than implementing BRT over long routes. This is not a criticism of the DOT or the MTA, because they're actually doing this - or talking about it.
I'll write a few posts about the various bridges and tunnels involved, and what the plans are to increase bus capacity.
In response to an earlier BRT post, Alon Levy commented that "the XBL works only because it feeds directly into a gigantic terminal." So I'll also talk about what can be done to speed the buses once they get across the bridges and tunnels, too.
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