The Dangers of Bus Rapid Transit

A week ago, a pedestrian stepped onto Eugene’s 11th Avenue, a one-way street, and got clobbered by a bus going the wrong way. The accident broke the pedestrian’s collar bone, pelvis, and six ribs.

Click image for a larger view.

It turns out that 11th, which had been a one-way street for decades, was recently turned into a two-way street with the contra flow being a dedicated bus lane, which has one bus every 10 to 15 minutes. Not only is this a complete waste of space — the cars that previously used that lane moved far more people per hour than a six-times-per-hour bus could possibly carry — it completely subverts all of the benefits of one-way streets.

Numerous tests of one-way streets in the 1950s showed that they could move more traffic more safely than two-way streets. Flows were improved because traffic signals in areas with one-way streets could be easily coordinated so that someone could drive through many intersections without having to stop for a red light. When I lived in Eugene, I used to bicycle down this very street, making it from the university to the other end of downtown without having to stop.

Traffic engineers also found that one-way streets were safer, particularly for pedestrians, because those pedestrians only had to look in one direction before crossing the street. Despite these benefits, an anti-auto movement has in recent years pushed for the re-conversion of one-way streets back to two-way streets.

As the above Google Street View photo shows, it isn’t immediately obvious that 11th is no longer a one-way street. One lane is marked “bus only” but there are no arrows indicating that the buses are moving in the opposite direction from the rest of the traffic. It is easily possible that a pedestrian could cross the street from the left side and have their view of any bus blocked by a truck or van before they stepped into the bus lane.

The bus lane not only makes 11th more dangerous for pedestrians, it eliminates the other benefit of a one-way street, which is smoother traffic flows. That’s because part of Eugene’s bus-rapid transit project, which cost taxpayers more than $75 million, was to give the buses priority over other traffic at signals.

I noted several years ago that Eugene’s original bus-rapid transit line, which connected Springfield with Eugene, was so poorly designed that the buses were no faster than the buses they replaced. The transit agency considered the line a success because riders believed they were going faster even when they weren’t, but the reality was that the opening of the line in 2012 generated no new transit riders.

The 11th Avenue line is an extension of that line that opened in 2017. Unlike the original line, this one was a little faster and did generate some new transit riders. However, it could have done that without going the wrong way on a one-way street and probably could have done it without a dedicated lane and priority at traffic signals. Bus rapid transit’s main speed advantage over regular buses is that it stops fewer times, not that it has dedicated lanes.

Lately, however, a major goal of transit agencies has been to cripple auto traffic in order to give people more incentives to ride transit. As the CEO of Los Angeles’ transit agency once said of the city that is often considered to be the most congested in the world, “it’s too easy to drive in this city,” so to force people to ride his buses he wanted to “make driving harder.” That’s what the dedicated lanes and transit signal priority for buses that only go six times an hour are all about.

Eugene isn’t the only city to give transit priority over automobiles and pedestrians by running transit the wrong way on one-way streets. As I’ve noted before, Denver does this in its downtown, which has resulted in some horrific injuries to pedestrians.

Before the pandemic, Denver transit carried just 2.0 percent of the region’s passenger-miles of travel, while Eugene transit carried 1.5 percent. Yet transit agencies have so frequently claimed that they are somehow “vital” to the cities they are supposed to serve that they arrogantly disrupt traffic patterns and create more dangerous streets for their own aggrandizement. This is just one more reason why transit should be demonized and not celebrated in most American cities.

Postscript: There is no link to a news article about the pedestrian accident that spurred this post, but I am familiar with it because the pedestrian is my brother.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

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