Traffic engineers and transit planners have devised a range of tricks to give buses an advantage where they can, including bus-only lanes.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Jarrett Walker an international consultant in public transit planning. He is the author of the book Human Transit and the blog HumanTransit.org.
It’s a common sight in Canadian cities: a bus full of passengers stuck behind a car that’s serving the needs of just one person. Maybe it’s an Uber or taxi blocking the lane, or someone making a delivery. Maybe it’s a badly parked car. Or maybe it’s a few cars, serving just a few people, but jointly enough to plug the entire street so that nothing else can get through.
When this happens, we have several different problems.
We have an economic problem, because the whole point of cities is to allow us to reach opportunities – jobs, education, shopping, friends – that give value and meaning to our lives. Cities create prosperity by bringing people together, but only if they are easy to move around in. When one person’s car blocks a bus with 30 people, the total access to opportunity in the city goes down, and that makes the city’s economy measurably weaker.
We have an environmental problem, because the people on the bus are trying to travel in a way that is better for the environment and climate, but are being discouraged from doing so. Public transit is what allows us to build our cities more densely so that we sprawl across less precious land, but only if transit can operate reliably, so that people will want to use it.
But above all, we have a simple moral problem. We are not being fair in how we share the scarce space of the city street. Simply by driving a car in the city, you claim a large amount of this space for your private use, leaving not enough room for everyone else. A transit customer, cyclist or pedestrian, on the other hand, is trying to use only their fair share of space, yet the motorist is often obstructing them.
These challenges are intrinsic to what a city is. A city is lots of people living and working close together, which means there’s relatively little space per person. Governing a city is an endless effort to help people share space more fairly, so that they don’t obstruct each other as much. This can only mean encouraging as many people as possible to travel in a way that uses less space: by walking, cycling or using public transit.
Editorial board: Speed up the bus by ending the free ride of street parkers
Understanding this, Canadian urban regions have already made great investments in public transit service, as well as in alternatives such as cycling and walking. Even with buses stuck in traffic, some big Canadian transit systems are serving one quarter or more of all the people moving down many busy urban and suburban streets, and on some of the busiest, like Vancouver’s Broadway, they carry more than half. That’s why many Canadian cities are seeing debates about whether to add more bus lanes to speed up public transit.
Liberating those buses to flow more smoothly would get more out of that investment that’s already being made. More people would reach their destinations sooner, so they would have more opportunities in their lives. Ridership would be even higher because more people would find transit to be a good use of their time. Meanwhile, buses would cycle through their routes more quickly, offering more frequency at less cost to the taxpayer.
The tools to do this are broadly called “transit priority.” Bus lanes are the most visible, but the tool box also includes signal priority, which gives transit a small advantage at traffic signals, and other strategies such as the careful relocation of bus stops. Traffic engineers and transit planners have devised a range of tricks to give buses an advantage where they can, some of which the motorist is unlikely to even notice.
Different tools work in different situations, of course. In the wide arterial streets of Canadian suburbs, where the street isn’t used for parking, the best solution is usually for transit to run in protected lanes in the median, with small platforms in the street at stops; in that case, the primary cost to motorists is closing some left turns. But on the narrower streets of our older dense cities, much harder choices have to be made. Should a transit lane be created along the curb, removing all street parking and potentially even preventing deliveries and taxi pickups during certain hours? How much enforcement is needed to keep the lane clear? These are difficult questions that require detailed analysis, discussion and compromise.
When you stumble on a debate about bus lanes in the media, the loudest voices all make the question sound simple. It’s easy to tell a story about how any change to a familiar street will unleash disaster. Many studies have found, for example, that local businesses along city streets tend to overestimate how many of their customers come by car, and express exaggerated fears of loss of business if parking is removed.
But if you listen closely to the proposals being made, you‘ll usually encounter dedicated public servants trying to find the least-bad solution to the wicked problem. Traffic engineers and transit planners study streets carefully, block by block, turn by turn, to find the least impactful way of giving transit the advantage it needs. If these professionals then seem a little impervious to the anger of local protests, it’s because they are used to people protesting absolutely any change to a street. Yet they also know that the way the street works now is also unacceptable to many people, especially those trying to get around without cars.
Canada’s major cities and transit authorities will continue to propose street design changes that nudge everyone toward sharing the scarce space of the city street more fairly. These proposals will always be compromises between the needs of different users of the street. The goal is always to make everyone’s lives better, and maximize the access to opportunity that is the whole purpose of cities. But if the result is a bit inconvenient for you, it’s probably also still a little inconvenient for everyone else, and that may mean it’s the right compromise for everyone. Urban life is all about making compromises so that we share limited space fairly, with no user allowed to veto the needs of others. In a city, if everyone is compromising, everyone is winning.