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Testimony on Bus Rapid Transit

Submitted to Montgomery County Planning Board
December 15, 2011
Summary of Recommendations

1. The MARC Growth and Investment Plan should be put in the master plan as quickly as possible.

2. The Planning Board should move forward towards a master plan amendment to add bus rapid transit corridors. Master planned BRT facilities should come close to the ITDP “gold standard.” Time-consuming master plan amendments should not be required for lesser improvements in bus service.

3. In the US 29 corridor, light rail should be evaluated as an alternative to bus rapid transit.

4. Alternative methods of accomodating left turns on bus rapid transit corridors should be evaluated. Among them should be the gold standard method of eliminating left turns across bus lanes at all but a few intersections.

5. Conversion of automobile lanes should be encouraged, and should not be limited to roads where there is excess capacity or where the bus lane will carry more people than a lane for general traffic.

6. The M83 corridor should be deleted from the study.

7. Treatment of intersections with bus lanes under the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance must be clarified. Intersections with uncongested bus lanes should pass the traffic test.

8. The Planning Board should endorse immediate implementation of the WMATA bus priority corridors for the purpose of identifying design and operation issues that BRT will encounter in the Montgomery County context.

MARC

The MARC Growth and Investment Plan, developed by the Maryland Transit Administration, offers an exciting vision for transit in Montgomery County. All-day, two-way service would connect the major centers of Silver Spring, White Flint, Rockville, Metropolitan Grove, and Germantown to each other and to downtown Washington. Projected ridership is almost quadruple the present ridership.

ACT believes this plan is the highest priority for transit investment in the upcounty. Once all-day connections are available at Metropolitan Grove to Washington and Frederick as well as most of Montgomery County's major activity centers, the Corridor Cities Transitway can be funded as a highly cost-effective local feeder to MARC as well as Shady Grove.

For all-day service, a third track must be built on most of the Metropolitan Branch right of way in Montgomery County. The MARC Growth and Investment plan should be added to the master plan now so that right of way can be reserved.

Master Plan amendment

ACT is excited about the opportunities the BRT initiative offers to improve bus service in the county. The Planning Board report represents an important step forward in clarifying what needs to be done to ensure that this promise is realized. We urge the Planning Board to pursue its efforts.

The Institute for Transportation & Development Policy, in its recent report entitled “Recapturing Global Leadership in Bus Rapid Transit,” has defined various levels of bus rapid transit. The highest level is the gold standard, which brings bus riders many of the advantages of light rail. Although it will be difficult to meet the gold standard in Montgomery County, we should strive to come as close as possible. We must avoid the fate of projects like Boston's Silver Line which were advertised as BRT but turned out to be little more than ordinary buses with new labels. Carrying a gold standard alternative through the analysis will provide a basis of comparison to give warning when BRT is being excessively watered down.

Master Plan amendments should address only those corridors where it is practical to provide a level of service close to the gold standard. Amendments to the Master Plan are expensive and time-consuming. Requiring a Master Plan amendment for lesser improvements in bus service would make it much harder to implement such improvements. We agree with the staff recommendation that the scope of the functional plan amendment should be limited. Bus priorities on existing pavement do not require master plan amendments; MCDOT often makes changes in roadway operations such as forbidding left turns without consulting the Planning Board.

US 29 corridor

ACT has long advocated light rail along US 29 from Silver Spring to Burtonsville. Our founder, Harry Sanders, was a leading participant in the county's 1993-1995 study of bus rapid transit on US 29. While we encourage improvements in bus service, we believe that in this corridor light rail is more feasible and may actually be less expensive than BRT. We have several reasons for this belief:

A light rail alternative should be carried forward in the study, at least until the point when it is clear whether LRT or BRT has lower costs.

Left turns

The Planning Board report makes a major contribution by addressing the important issue of left turns. In a BRT system, left turns across the bus lane must be forbidden at non-signalized intersections for reasons of both safety and bus operations. The Planning Board should seek community buy-in to this concept as early as possible.

We are not sure that the left turn solution assumed in the report – allowing both left turns and U turns at all signalized intersections – will prove feasible. Montgomery County currently forbids U-turns at many intersections where left turns are allowed. There are reasons for this policy, and they may apply to intersections in BRT corridors.

Furthermore, the ITDP report (p. 27) states that signal cycles in BRT corridors should never have more than three phases, and generally should have two phases. (This is a general rule, even for BRT that falls short of gold standard.) Allowing left turns on both roads at major Montgomery County intersections requires four phases (two straight-ahead phases and two left-turn phases). In order to meet the three-phase criterion, left turns across the bus lane will have to be forbidden at major cross streets. Drivers wishing to go left on these roads would make U-turns at less heavily traveled cross streets, where traffic on the cross street does not need a separate left-turn phase at the intersections.

The operational solution to the left turn problem will affect land use requirements for BRT. For example, right of way will be needed for holding lanes where U-turns are allowed. Therefore, until this matter is resolved, the study should carry forward several alternatives.

A gold standard alternative, with two-phase cycles at most intersections, should be among the alternatives studied. The gold standard alternative, with its general avoidance of left turns across transitways, will require many drivers turning left to make right turns through local streets. This will require reconfiguration of existing strip malls with new grid street patterns. The study should address this issue, at least at a conceptual level.

The gold standard thus interacts with redevelopment along the BRT corridors. Future development of corridors is an essential part of the initiative in any case. The financing plan depends on it. “One-stop” shopping at BRT stations is essential too to make ridership part of a transit-oriented lifestyle. Thus it makes sense to plan for redevelopment as part of the BRT initiative.

Lane conversions

The report suggests converting existing traffic lanes to bus lanes only when either the remaining car and truck lanes will still be below capacity or the bus lane will carry more people than a general-purpose lane. These criteria are much too restrictive. The entire county benefits when a general purpose lane is converted to bus-only – when drivers switch to bus, traffic is relieved not just on the road where a lane is converted, but on other roads that feed it and run parallel.

And traffic relief is just one of the many benefits of transit. Others include reduced travel time for employees and students; the ability of households to get by with one less car; health benefits of walking; reduction in greenhouse gases; new opportunities for sensible land development; better transportation access for our aging baby boomer population; and availability of a robust transit system when gas prices increase.

The lane conversion issue is extremely important because there will surely not be enough money for quick build-out of all the new BRT lanes that are proposed. Where construction of new lanes is delayed, lane conversions should be pursued as an interim measure.

M83

We endorse the removal of M83 from the corridor study. BRT requires a series of stations surrounded by dense development, and M83 is not being promoted as a development corridor. The BRT study should not be used as an excuse for wasteful spending on automobile infrastructure at a time when transit needs to be the spending priority.

APFO

The APFO traffic test implicitly assumes that all lanes at an intersection move at the same speed. Its application to BRT lanes needs to be clarified.

At intersections with a dedicated bus lane, no one is delayed by congestion on the car and truck lanes unless they choose to be delayed. As long as traffic on the bus lane is not congested, anyone can get to their destination without delay by taking the bus. The car and truck lanes, on the other hand, can be used only by those who own cars. The traffic test should therefore be applied to the bus lane and not to the car and truck lanes.

Bus priority corridors

Rollout of the comprehensive bus rapid transit system is years away. WMATA's bus priority corridors, if fully implemented, will give thousands of riders an early sample of bus rapid transit. It will also be an opportunity to uncover and solve the design and operations issues that will inevitably arise when bus rapid transit is implemented on Montgomery County's high-speed arterials. Trial and error will surely be necessary to work out the details of such matters as left turns, intersection treatments, and pedestrian crossings at mid-block stations.

Success will build needed public support for the full network. If, on the other hand, the county is unable to summon the political will to make bus priority corridors happen quickly, then it would be fair for others to doubt our commitment. By demonstrating our commitment to bus priorities, we set the stage that may encourage financing for our county’s rapid transit system.