Last week the Metro board approved the contract for a new Bus Rapid Transit study. Metro will spend $1.2 million on a 28-month "Bus Rapid Transit Vision and Principles Study" with another $611,000 for an option to add on a candidate corridors study.
The irony wasn't lost on Metro boardmember and County Supervisor Hilda Solis, who commented last week that Metro should be integrating existing studies and filling in gaps like Valley Boulevard.
Valley Boulevard was one of the 14 priority BRT corridors identified in that 2013 study:
Artesia (Gateway Cities/South Bay)
Atlantic (Gateway Cities)
Broadway (Westside/Central)
Burbank‐North Hollywood (San Fernando Valley)
Hawthorne (South Bay)
La Cienega‐Vernon (Westside/Central)
Pico (Westside/Central)
North Hollywood‐Pasadena (San Fernando/San Gabriel Valleys)
One things that really irks this Streetsblog editor is how bus improvements get "studies" while highways, express lanes, rail all get "plans" and "projects."
How have Metro's BRT projects fared on the ground?
The Orange Line BRT exceeds ridership projections and is being upgraded to rail, though its speed has suffered from Metro and L.A. City's inability to give buses priority at intersections.
The mostly freeway-running Silver Line BRT is pretty fast, but its mid-freeway stations are miserably loud and polluted. L.A. City has failed to give Silver Line buses priority on downtown streets.
The project most analogous to the 14 planned... er... studied corridors is the $31.5 million 7-mile Wilshire Boulevard BRT project, featuring peak-hour bus-only lanes. Since the first segment opened in 2013, these bus lanes have been plagued by cars, cars, cars, and cars. Enforcement is pathetic, as documented in 2015 and even last week.
That Metro's multi-million-dollar BRT projects languish while multi-billion-dollar highway and rail projects get built is not entirely Metro's fault. Metro has to work with other jurisdictions. In 2015, the city of L.A. approved a Mobility Plan that calls for an extensive network of BRT corridors, but L.A. has trouble prioritizing transit... so L.A. hasn't added new bus-only lanes.
Metro NextGen staff report that they are working with the L.A. City Department of Transportation (LADOT) to identify bus speed improvement upgrades. Hopefully these negotiations will bear fruit.
If Boston can do pop-up bus-only lanes (now approved to become permanent), then Metro can work with L.A. County municipalities to get BRT improvements on the ground. Bus riders are counting on Metro to go beyond studies and really implement projects that speed up bus service. Perhaps Metro could work with cities to do short-term pilots (maybe six months) to test out BRT concepts on the ground.
Foothill Transit CEO Doran Barnes credits their successes to a "commitment to community," a "spirit of innovation," and fruitful collaborations with numerous partners
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