I've read thoughtful articles about improving the efficiency of certain bus lines. I took the crawling AC Transit 51 line home from Berkeley to my house in Oakland Wednesday night. I was annoyed by the usual slowdowns from traffic lights, stop signs, and bus stops that occur frequently. It lead me to look up a blog post that someone wrote about improving the line: http://oaklandliving.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/ac-transits-ideas-for-making-the-51-faster-and-more-reliable/The post is very thorough and well thought out. It references meetings about the lines and all kinds of possible improvements--removing stops, creating more space for stops, splitting the line in half, allowing rear door entry, etc., and says that a BRT system would be the best fix, with some caveats:
Now the 51 line is of course not the same as the 1 line. For starters, College Avenue will never have rapid service because it’s difficult for buses to pass each other and there’s often near stopped traffic for several blocks. But for the rest of the line, particularly along Broadway and University, which have several traffic lanes, rapid buses could move very quickly. Really, this is the type of service I dream of. Unfortunately, this option got just three paragraphs of attention in the report, which makes me concerned that ACT isn’t taking this option seriously. I hope that changes.Never have rapid service? That is where I stray from mainstream thinking, where people talk in terms of bandade style fixes to a broken transit. The writer refers to College Avenue, which is a great street full of restaurants and student housing and stretches south from the UC Berkeley Campus through the neighborhoods of Elmwood and Rockridge, both loaded with residents, shoppers, and diners. The housing surrounding is in the highest demand, even after the housing bust. The bus is atrocious on College Ave because the traffic is stop-and-go, and several intersections have heavy cross traffic, which means slow traffic light periods and minutes of delay when vehicles pile up at lights or stop signs. Neither buses nor cars belong on this street. It's a couple miles long, wonderfully walkable, and Telegraph Avenue parallels it a few blocks away and mostly has four lanes for traffic (though they are serious about taking two lanes for BRT there, as indicated in the quote.) People who drive on College Ave are usually going from or too somewhere on the street, not using it as a thruway. What College Ave needs to be is a non-asphalt walking surface with either a nice streetcar down the middle or maneuverable metro system that goes underneath. I prefer the metro because the streetcars that I've seen on pedestrian streets are rather slow, and I want effective transit for the entire 51 line.
I'm going to diagram the 51 line and a reworked College Ave here because it really is a perfect candidate for car-free neighborhoods and a vastly improved transit line. First, a look at the north end of the line. It begins at the water at the Berkeley Amtrak station and the 4th Street shopping district, which is a popular upscale area that is mostly accessed via car (reasonable assumption.) The line then heads east to downtown Berkeley where it meets the main Berkeley BART station and passes around the perimeter of the busiest part of the UC Berkeley campus. It then continues south down our featured College Ave, meets another BART line in Rockridge (where it intersects Hwy 24) and shortly after goes down Broadway to downtown Oakland. I've omitted the part of the line in downtown Oakland and the city of Alameda because from Rockridge to BART parallels the bus, making it less important, and Alameda can be considered a different line that is responsible for connecting Alameda with the downtown Oakland BART stations.
In case you didn't notice, this is a snapshot of a realtime map showing the stops with red dots and the positions of the buses and their directions. I snapped this on Saturday morning when the service is sparse.
http://www.nextbus.com/googleMap/googleMap.jsp?a=actransit&r=51&d=51_246_1&s=36
http://www.nextbus.com/googleMap/googleMap.jsp?a=actransit&r=51&d=51_246_1&s=36Here is a Google Map showing my proposed Metro:
Costs/Benefits
To get a general idea of the cost of such a system. I consulted Wikipedia's metro and light rail articles. It turns out if you make the system a combination of light rail on the wide streets and street car on the narrow streets then the system fits existing light rail implementations, such as Calgary's in Canada. According to the Wikipedia Light Rail Article the Calgary system cost around $24 million per mile. The operating cost per mile are $163 per train per mile. Since the main part of my route is 5 miles we could have a capital cost of $121 million (the optional part to Oakland makes it 7-8 miles.) I know from personal experience that Calgary's light rail does a bit of tunneling, and we would have to do the same for at least a quarter mile through downtown Berkeley and consider the cost similar. Calgary's costs are on the low end because they leased a lot of rail right of way, but in our case we're taking existing street, which is free. Now, to implement the ideal solution with the track underground from downtown Berkeley to Rockridge there would be a considerable extra cost. Nevertheless Berkeley's residents agreed to pay a surcharge of $18 million in 1969 ($104.6 million in 2008 dollars) to make all of BART underground in Berkeley (part was already going to be underground.) Since the metro from downtown Berkeley to Rockridge is the same distance as the BART track through Berkeley, we can argue that the extra cost of tunneling would be around $100 million, giving a total capital cost of $221 million.
The more I think about it the more I prefer to keep the system above ground, despite the potential slow downs, because it gives a good excuse for clearing cars of College Ave and fully pedestrianizing it. Here's a very amateur model using Sketchup and a Google Earth image of the College Ave. and Claremont Ave. intersection. I thought it might be useful to take advantage of the extra space provided by an intersection to put a tram stop and allow trams to pass if there was only room for one track along the street. I think a well-automated system could handle this configuration well. If a single track had a station with double track every quarter or half mile then the trams could make efficient use of the street. I'm not sure what to do about a break down, which is why it's likely better to have double track throughout. Perhaps there would be double track throughout and the tram would only use one track and split at stations, as below, but the second track would be on a car/truck lane and could be used for emergencies, or at times when cars and trucks were disallowed.
And just to keep things in reality, here's an image of the trams in Montpellier, France:
To get a general idea of the cost of such a system. I consulted Wikipedia's metro and light rail articles. It turns out if you make the system a combination of light rail on the wide streets and street car on the narrow streets then the system fits existing light rail implementations, such as Calgary's in Canada. According to the Wikipedia Light Rail Article the Calgary system cost around $24 million per mile. The operating cost per mile are $163 per train per mile. Since the main part of my route is 5 miles we could have a capital cost of $121 million (the optional part to Oakland makes it 7-8 miles.) I know from personal experience that Calgary's light rail does a bit of tunneling, and we would have to do the same for at least a quarter mile through downtown Berkeley and consider the cost similar. Calgary's costs are on the low end because they leased a lot of rail right of way, but in our case we're taking existing street, which is free. Now, to implement the ideal solution with the track underground from downtown Berkeley to Rockridge there would be a considerable extra cost. Nevertheless Berkeley's residents agreed to pay a surcharge of $18 million in 1969 ($104.6 million in 2008 dollars) to make all of BART underground in Berkeley (part was already going to be underground.) Since the metro from downtown Berkeley to Rockridge is the same distance as the BART track through Berkeley, we can argue that the extra cost of tunneling would be around $100 million, giving a total capital cost of $221 million.
The more I think about it the more I prefer to keep the system above ground, despite the potential slow downs, because it gives a good excuse for clearing cars of College Ave and fully pedestrianizing it. Here's a very amateur model using Sketchup and a Google Earth image of the College Ave. and Claremont Ave. intersection. I thought it might be useful to take advantage of the extra space provided by an intersection to put a tram stop and allow trams to pass if there was only room for one track along the street. I think a well-automated system could handle this configuration well. If a single track had a station with double track every quarter or half mile then the trams could make efficient use of the street. I'm not sure what to do about a break down, which is why it's likely better to have double track throughout. Perhaps there would be double track throughout and the tram would only use one track and split at stations, as below, but the second track would be on a car/truck lane and could be used for emergencies, or at times when cars and trucks were disallowed.
And just to keep things in reality, here's an image of the trams in Montpellier, France:
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