Quotations from a story in the East Bay Express tell a sad story of an effort to implement BRT that began in 2001-
“In its current incarnation, AC Transit hopes to install BRT in the two center lanes of Shattuck and Telegraph avenues, International Boulevard, and East 14th Street, from downtown Berkeley to San Leandro….The $400 million proposal, which does not include the costs of the Van Hool buses, is in its final environmental review stage….the agency’s operating costs have spiraled out of control. Between 2000 and 2007, rising salaries and medical benefit costs, along with higher fuel prices and expensive buses, caused the agency’s annual operating expenses to spike from $195.2 million to $290.5 million….From 2002 to 2007, it cut its total number of bus lines from 157 to 93, thus reducing the number of neighborhoods it serves….According to statistics compiled by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, a state agency that oversees state and federal transportation funds, AC Transit lost about 9 percent of its annual passengers from 2000-1 through 2005-6 a staggering 6.1 million people, or more than twice the total population of Alameda and Contra Costa counties.”
There’s quite a bit more to this story, but one thing seems pretty plain- BRT is not an inherently simple, economical and easy-to-implement solution to transit challenges. In fact, even if everything went right, which it quite obviously hasn’t here, you would still have a system inherently inferior to rail.
So, why not do it right to begin with?
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