Walking to nowhere, CA

(Curitiba BRT from Wikipedia)

Urbanists often chat about creating place, and a fair part of that means creating a solid transit station to access it. I've read and listened to many a discussion that declares BRT to be preferable to tram, light rail, or metro because of 1 or 2 orders of magnitude of cost savings (e.g. BRT in Curitiba, Brazil was 300 times cheaper to construct and maybe maintain then metro.) That may be true, though the cost of the metro buys a new, absolute right-of-way, no new direct emissions, and a host of other measurable benefits (flat floors) that BRT generally lacks. These are well-debated differences; so I'm more interested in steering the discussion toward the intangible benefits of metro.

I define metro here as anything running on dedicated rail, cables, funicular rail, etc in order to cover all types of geography but exclude vehicles that run on any medium that crosses cars or pedestrians without full right-of-way. Thus I include light rail with gated crossing but not that which stops for traffic lights. I hesitantly include trams with full right-of-way, provided they have station stops no more than every half mile (quarter-mile for dense places like Manhattan.)

So what keeps BRT from fitting this definition? The buses can run on dedicated asphault lines that have barriers, special painting, or other characteristics to impersonate rail. The bus can be electric to imitate the smooth ride of metro. Thus it can technically meet my definition. I've never actually heard of a full right-of-way electric bus. It's unlikely that one exists for the simple reason that buses always cross other streets without gated crossings. It's possible to simulate full right-of-way by switching traffic lights in anticipation of the bus. I've heard this proposed but I've yet to hear of it implemented.

The vast majority of BRT implementations will not meet my criteria for metro. So what? Well, I believe that a transit station cannot define a space unless its transport meets this criteria. Why? When I think of a metro station, whether subterranean or ground level, I think of a place that I can arrive and trust that the transport will arrive within 15 minutes (7 is much better) and I must believe that it will deliver me to my destination with no interruptions but for the stations en route. Being able to arrive and leave a place predictably with transit is what defines place for me. There are many neighborhoods in the Bay Area, like Lakeshore/Grand in Oakland where I previously lived, that I cannot define as somewhere I would go casually because it often takes thirty minutes to go to and from there from downtown Oakland two miles away. It thus fades away as a place for me and becomes instead a nuisance that requires matching bus schedules with metro and real-time predictions.

If I lose my confidence in a station as a predictable origin or destination, it devolves toward a bus stop. A bus stop is a marked spot on the street where transit arrives unpredictably and reaches it's destination in a variable amount of time. It may be aided by real-time predictors and padded schedules, but the former is nothing more than a prediction and the latter wastes time. To me, most BRT stops will be bus stops, not stations, and thus will be unable to define place for me. I'm aware that BRT can have prepay areas and ramps to the bus to minimize delays. These are wonderful and essential features for making a real station, but do little to offset the unpredictability of traffic.

True reliability is the intrinsic value of metro. It's what puts masses of people from all economic classes on metro and keeps many off buses. I think it is the same feeling that will make significant numbers weary of BRT. I'm not talking specifically about the appeal of rail as a comforting medium, though that is real as well. I'm talking about the reliability that rail right-of-way enables, that can only be created hypothetically by asphalt, and doesn't seem to exist yet in practice.

We are probably going to have a lot of BRT in the world soon because the cost is appealing and it keeps the oil, tire, and auto industries in the game. We are going to have a lot of BRT that is good enough. But there is nothing like looking at a true metro map and knowing that those colored lines represent uinterruptable paths and knowing that when the iPhone app says "depart 8:10AM, transfer 8:22AM (timed transfer), arrive 8:37AM" that barring malfunction and emergency you will in fact arrive at 8:37AM. I know you can make that prediction with BRT but I doubt you can implement it reliably, especially the timed transfer. Timed transfers are the unsung heroes of metro and regional rail. They make the colored lines act like a single color. But a bus with one-too-many red traffic lights ruins connections.

I think we need to spend a lot more effort exploring all the benefits of metro. If we can figure how to score the intangibles then I think the rails start to look pretty competitive.