Two years ago, Berkeley sabotaged a BRT plan in the East Bay. Now, will Mountain View be the South Bay version of Berkeley?
The [Mountain View] City Council spent two and half hours discussing a plan for dedicated bus rapid transit lanes on El Camino Real on Tuesday, coming to the same position it came to after a similar discussion in June — opposed. The council took a 4-2 vote in the study session, with council members Mike Kasperzak and Margaret Abe-Koga in support of the dedicated lanes and member John Inks abstaining.
The plans would reduce El Camino Real from six lanes to four, and add two dedicated bus lanes down the middle of the street and bike lanes on each side. With two bus stations located on the median, one at Castro Street and one at San Antonio shopping center, BRT buses would run every 10 minutes, 18 hours a day.
Plans for BRT on El Camino Real are part of an ambitious “Grand Boulevard” effort. It would convert the highway from a automobile strip-mall thoroughfare into a more bike/ped friendly environment. The bike and bus lanes are projected to quadruple the number of bike trips, and generate 18,000 new transit trips. BRT would also serve as a feeder to Caltrain and any future HSR stations.
But Council seems to have other priorities, and is more concerned with maintaining the route for high-speed auto traffic.
Will VTA run local service along the road, or will there just be the express bus? If so, will the local buses run in the transitway or in mixed traffic?
So Council likes stroads?
Booo! So shortsighted.
I guess I’ll be “taking the lane” on El Camino on my bike.
Thank goodness someone did the right thing. It’s bikes or buses — you can’t do both. Now, to kill off BRT on the rest of El Camino Real…
Peter, why can’t you do both?
10 minute headways for 18 hours a day sounds awesome.
> Peter, why can’t you do both?
In theory, you can put bike lanes on highways, but it’s never happened — for obvious reasons.
Some people think BRT is about improving transit for the transit-dependent — there is little to no evidence for this. Others think BRT is about keeping cars dominant — there is overwhelming evidence for this.
We can either believe what the automakers are marketing to us with BRT, or we can believe “our own lyin’ eyes”. Huge buses ==> no biking, no walking, cars remaining dominant — this is the reason automakers, oil companies, etc. are pouring money into BRT.
Simply put, there’s no shortcut to some magical panacea — we need real bicycle infrastructure. 90% or so of our mode share is motorized — what’s wrong with building some non-motorized infrastructure before we spend gazillions more on motorized transport?
Just look at every BRT example around the world — perfect dystopias. But if you watch a streetfilm of some developing nation’s bus system, we’re led to believe these are actually good places to be. When someone who is not being paid by the car companies reports from the same BRT system, it’s rightly regarded as a nightmare. Follow the money.
For the Cleveland Healthline BRT, for instance, they actually painted some non-buffered bike lanes along part of the route — parts of Euclid Avenue. Nobody in their right mind is ever going to bike on that street, next to 20-ton bendy buses, zooming within inches of their elbows. If we want to prevent cycling, there’s a great formula for it — take the most major arterials in your city/town — the places where people actually want and need to walk and bike, and fill them with massive bus infrastructure, leaving no room for walking and biking — and make sure to destroy the streetscape generally, with long waits at intersections, dangerous highway-within-a-highway zone with zooming buses, a poor bus-quality ride experience to make sure on the most desperate will ride the bus, etc.
Here’s five more examples of how to keep the car king with BRT:
http://thisbigcity.net/five-cities-with-bus-rapid-transit-systems/
On the other hand, it seems perfectly viable to put bicycles right next to train lines. Perhaps because trains stay on their tracks, while buses don’t stay in their lanes?
Peter,
Despite the “highway” label, El Camino Real is more of a suburban retail strip street than urban expressway. Parts of it are expressway-ish, but large stretches are more urban in character, with buildings fronting the street and lower car speeds. There’s a regional effort called the “grand boulevard initiative” that aims to transform El Camino into a mixed-use, multimodal regional boulevard. The BRT proposal would include a buffered bike lane, colored in conflict areas with driveways and intersections. Advocates are working on making this more of a cycle track, but with all the driveways it may be difficult to implement at this moment in time.
Additionally, VTA will remove porkchop islands, install new mid block cross walks, and build bulb outs at minor intersections. They are also looking for Caltrans approval to reduce lane width to 11′ travel lanes and 10′ for turn lanes, which will undoubtedly calm traffic. Sound impossible? Well, Caltrans is coming around on multimodal street design and a recent El Camino intersection improvement in Palo Alto features curb extensions, mid block crosswalk refuges, and narrower lanes.
As for the BRT v. Rail issue, this is the opportunity we have to transform El Camino, right now. Santa Clara county already made the decision to throw most of its transit dollars towards a questionable commuter rail line, so I’ll take BRT over nothing.
If El Camino is not yet a highway, it will become a highway with the introduction of BRT — that’s the point of BRT — to destroy communities/towns/livability by building highways that make alternatives to the personal automobile unbearable.
If we want to make El Camino grand, there’s a very easy way — build some cycletracks, do whatever beautification you want, and be done with it — not just easy, but extraordinarily inexpensive, and actually green, instead of greenwashed. There’s no reason we need to build a highway-within-a-highway just so we can do some beautification and landscaping — beautifying El Camino should not be tied to the goals of the automotive and petrochemical industries — there’s no reason to buy into the argument that we can only improve El Camino Real if we agree to build this bus highway in the middle of it.
As for things being ‘difficult to implement right now’ — well, life is full of decisions. Are cycletracks more difficult to implement than reorganizing an entire street/road/highway to push massive bus-only lanes and stops _into the middle of the road_, years of construction, hundreds of millions of dollars, serious business and quality of life disruptions, etc.? I doubt it.
On the other hand, we could install cycletracks along the entire length of El Camino Real in a matter of days. The entrances and exits from strip malls can remain — it’s not a big deal — drivers will learn to deal with the hordes of cyclists and pedestrians now cruising El Camino Real — they may not like it, but I’m in the business of improving transportation, not making sure that driving is the only viable option for non-poor people. We just ship in a bunch of these little rubber lane separators, like the ones that run along Beach Ave in Santa Cruz, and we’re good. One lane of El Camino highway in each direction — boom — done. Overnight we’ve just made El Camino Real one of the premiere streets in North America. For a few hundred thousand dollars, maybe a few million if we’re talking the whole length of it from SF to SJ — which we should be.
http://g.co/maps/qqr9s
I understand that people want to maintain and enhance the highway-like characteristics of El Camino — I just disagree. I’m actually hoping we can allow people to walk and bike El Camino — people are suffering miserably — we have to allow them to get around under their own power, without being terrorized. That means the speed-inducing, refugee-creating center islands have to go, all those crazy pedestrian and biker-harassing right-turn lanes have to be disappeared, we need full-on physically-protected cycletracks, etc. Maybe some day we’ll make a decision to implement real transit on El Camino, — throw in a tram and watch it become the most heavily-used tram line in North America overnight — but if there’s no political will for it right now, then let cars continue to run wild — all I’m asking if for a little space for walking and biking — a very little.
Right now there are still people parking cars on El Camino. For real? We can let cars _park_ on El Camino Real but to implement cycletracks would be ‘difficult’? I’m not buying it.
But don’t take my word for it — look at those five examples I provided — they are apparently examples of things which we’re being told are _good_ for us. Don’t pee on my leg and tell it’s raining. I guess if you spend enough money, and repeat it often enough, eventually it becomes true, regardless of how insane — that’s how propaganda works. We just have to stay rational.
It’s BRT or bikes — the choice is largely up to us.
Whenever you hear the word “cycletrack” (as you do in SFBC circles all the time these days, sadly) you can be pretty sure you’re in the company of a certified loon.
BRT plus bikes sounds just fine to me. But that’s because I’m in the employ of the evil car+bus+oil cartel, who pay me never to drive just to lull you into letting down your guard so they can turn Mountain View into a dystopia. Bow down before your new “20 ton bendy buses” overlords!
I didn’t know that Van Hool and New Flyer we tools of the same conspiracy responsible for Harbor Blvd and Irvine. You learn something everyday.
Oh and when you say “bendy buses” you sound like Jeremy Clarkson, that is to say you sound like a fucking moron.
The best part was “On the other hand, we could install cycletracks along thev entire length of El Camino Real in a matter of days” Do you suggest we gain access to the same alien technology and slave labor used by the history channel to build the pyramids? Once they are done they could finish the 2nd ave. subway in 3-4 months.
El Camino already isn’t really used for high speed auto traffic. It’s used for one lane of medium speed auto traffic and two lanes of slow drivers trying to turn left or right from their respective lanes into a driveway. And it’s never completely congested to the point where bus lanes would provide a huge benefit. The best way to improve bus travel times would be by having an actual working priority system for traffic lights for the rapid bus, and by having bulb-outs at stops to avoid having to wait to merge back into traffic, which is more of an issue for the local bus, since it makes many more stops.
As far as cycling goes, El Camino could certainly benefit from bike lanes in a few spots, though that might require some more serious road reconfiguration, since those places are where the the existing right lane is too narrow to comfortably share with cars. But what makes riding on the road really terrifying is all the cars pulling into and out of driveways, and a “cycle track”, assuming it’s the parking-separated sort of thing they’ve installed on some Manhattan avenues, would only make that situation worse and more dangerous.
The terrifying part about riding on El Camino is not knowing if the car, truck, or bus zooming up behind you is going to end your life or just cripple you. Common sense says to install cycletracks. Introducing cycletracks, and thus, cyclists, is a common and well-proven traffic-calming and safety mechanism – there’s every reason in the world to install cycletracks on El Camino Real.
As for BRT, the truth about the actual on-the-ground experience of such a system occasionally slips into the light of day, if only for a brief moment. It will be promptly ignored by most of the ‘progressive’ transportation blogosphere — just as Obama’s crimes are ignored by his fanboys and fangirls:
http://thisbigcity.net/bogota-citizens-youtube-criticize-transmilenio-brt/
A nice little cash infusion from Embarq/TheCityFix/WRI/Shell/Volvo for some type of ‘sponsored content relationship’ will fix the ThisBigCity.net blog, I’m sure, just as it has fixed Streetfilms’ opinion of BRT. Hey, a man’s gotta eat!
Peter, the faults of Transmilenio as presented in the article you’ve referred to stem purely from the fact that it is so successful, that the ridership exceeds even its enormous (for a BRT) capacity. Rest assured, something like that is of no concern on the Peninsula.
ComradeFrana, no matter how BRT fails, it’s always cast as a success.
Nobody riding the BRT? It was misdesigned.
BRT unable to carry enough passengers? It’s a victim of its own success.
BRT spewing tons of cancer-causing, asthma-exacerbating toxins into the Bogota air every day? We can’t have everything.
BRT destroys the urban landscape and treats citizens like animals? Buses and trains are just transportation technologies — how we treat poor people should not be the concern of transportation officials.
An objective look at Transmilenio shows it to be a failure for the people of Bogota. Now the city has to construct a real mass transit system — and they’re going to have to build it underground, at incredible expense. Peñalosa should have worked to get an at-grade rail-based system built.
I don’t mind so much that people all over the world are choosing to destroy their cities and towns with massive buses — I just don’t want them to do it to my town.
France and Canada have both converted BRT lines to rail — Bogota should do the same, and they should do it at grade. The Canada Line went from BRT to full grade-separated metro — from BRT’s 20,000+ trips per day to the Canada Line’s 110,000+ trips per day, and growing.
El Camino is not the problem. I85, 101,680, 880, 280, and 17 are the problem. We need a solution to these long commutes. Suspending rail over these is the solution, because the govt. already owns the right-of-way. Expensive? — Let’s put our brilliant Silicon minds on it! Today you can buy a $5M computer for $500. Obviously we can build overhead railways. It’s an engineering problem. Where are the engineers? — Here!
Cutting auto traffic on El Camino, where traffic is to be expected for short haul convenience will just create another point of congestion. Nobody that lives 2 miles from El Camino is going to walk there to take the bus!