Editor’s Note: Calgary TransitCamp contributor Peter Schreyvers continues his series of postings tonight on our vision for a public transportation system for this great city where taking transit is second nature. Here is his next entry in the series.
Over the course of the next eight months, Calgary TransitCamp will undertake an exploration of the future of transit in Calgary, a tour of what is to come. We believe Calgary can become a truly great transit city. A city where transit is a convenient, fast, affordable, and comfortable mode of transportation for all Calgarians.
Bus Rapid Transit. It is something we have discussed on this blog before and is a term familiar to many, but still unknown to some. It is an integral part of the future transit network for Calgary, providing much-needed crosstown routes and access to places not served by the LRT system, like Mount Royal University, Rockyview Hospital and Foothills Industrial Park. It provides high frequency, fast, and convenient transit service. But what is it?
Bus Rapid Transit is sort of a hybrid between light rail transit and regular bus service. Essentially it is a beefed-up bus route that provides more rapid service, but sacrifices some aspects of regular bus service, such as area coverage and close stop spacing. There are generally four components to a Bus Rapid Transit route that make it, well, rapid. These four measures all address one area where regular buses spend too much time: in traffic, collecting fares, stopping for passengers, and stopped at lights.
Dedicated Lanes — Regular buses suffer from a terrible affliction. They get stuck in traffic. As passengers on rail transit whizz by snarled traffic, regular buses are the regular traffic. Probably the most significant feature of a Bus Rapid Transit system is that it avoids this affliction by completely removing itself from traffic.
Bus Rapid Transit typically operates in lanes that are dedicated for its use (bus only lanes), or at least in lanes restricted to traffic in some way. This can be in the form of fully dedicated lanes, to queue jumps (places where buses can move ahead of regular traffic while waiting for a traffic signal), to lanes shared with other, yet still restricted, vehicles. In different cities taxis, carpool vehicles, emergency vehicles, and reverse- commute traffic is permitted to share the lane with transit. Sometimes the bus lanes are simply regular traffic lanes that have been converted to bus lanes using some paint and other materials and other times they are entirely new structures, built with bridges, overpasses, and even elevated sections.
Dedicated lanes are, in our opinion, a must for a BRT system. Operating in regular traffic turns a route from BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) to BST (a Bus Stuck in Traffic). The entire point of a BRT system is to eliminate delays caused by traffic and to provide predictability in travel times. As our city develops its long term network plan, implementing dedicated bus lanes is essential. In future blogs, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges for dedicated lanes that go along with each route.
Off-Vehicle Fare Payment/Multi door boarding — A bus spends a considerable amount of time on its route simply waiting as customers line up one-by-one to board the bus and for each to individually pay the driver or show their pass to the driver. One study in New York found that the costs associated with the time it takes for one passenger to pay their fare (lost time, labour cost of the operator, cost of gas, etc.) was in fact greater than the fare itself. In order to reduce this time waiting, many BRT systems use off-vehicle fare payment, where passengers pay for their fare prior to boarding the bus, using ticket machines or other means and multiple doors for boarding. Instead of using just the one door at the front of the bus, passengers can get on and off using multiple doors. Restricting use to paying customers is done either through the use of controlled gates (like most subway systems) or through the proof-of-purchase system, where transit officials will randomly check passengers on transit vehicles and issue tickets to those who don’t have a pass (as is currently practiced on the Calgary LRT).
Off-vehicle fare payment and multiple door boarding are incredibly important because they reduce the time burden of each passenger on the system. For regular bus service, each time a customer boards they delay everyone else on the bus by a few seconds (what we would call an externality). So the busier the bus gets, the longer everyone’s trip takes, including the passenger who is paying. This can lead not only to longer travel times, but also to unreliability of service. However, by requiring each passenger to pay for their fare prior to getting on the bus the time each passenger takes paying their fare delays only them, and not everyone else. The result is a much less time spent on transit for everyone.
Limited Stops — Another downside of regular bus service is that it stops so frequently. While useful for local routes that intend to provide greater coverage and easier accessibility to stops, locating stops every few blocks can make a crosstown journey incredibly slow. In order to combat this, BRT systems typically space stops much farther apart. While some passengers have to walk farther to access the stations, everyone’s commute is shortened because the amount of time the bus spends stopped is reduced. BRT stations tend to be at major destinations (such as Mount Royal University), or at major intersections, where passengers may be transferring from other routes. Because of its limited stops, BRT does not serve as an everywhere-to-everywhere service. Instead it is a rapid, limited stop service that gets people from one point to another quickly.
Signal Priority and Control — Finally, regular bus services, unlike separated transit services, spend a lot of time waiting at traffic lights. While this doesn’t necessarily put buses at a disadvantage compared to regular traffic, it doesn’t give them a leg up either. To be truly effective, a BRT system has to have an appeal over driving, and to do that it needs to avoid delays that regular traffic faces, such as waiting at traffic lights. To accomplish this, many BRT systems implement some sort of technology that provides them an advantage at traffic signals. This could include devices equipped on buses that send signals to traffic lights to turn (or remain) green when the bus approaches, thus avoiding red lights, or it could simply mean that signals are timed so as to facilitate buses moving through multiple intersections. Either way, this advantage at traffic lights gives BRT systems a leg up on regular traffic, which can be the difference between a successful system and a failed system.
