Capital Metro’s long-anticipated, $47.6 million rapid bus project, designed to carry more passengers faster than existing bus lines along two busy north-south corridors, might not be as rapid as planned.
Despite an agency goal of offering time savings of 10 percent, in hopes of attracting more people to buses, the two lines would mostly offer minimal time savings, according to a Capital Metro presentation on the MetroRapid bus system, now scheduled to start operating in 2014.
In one case, a MetroRapid bus running from Howard Lane in North Austin to downtown would make the trip in 47 minutes – the same as an existing limited-stop bus that runs the same route. Trips between South Austin and downtown on that same line would offer time savings of just two to three minutes.
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Capital Metro, which has an aging bus fleet, would have had to buy new buses – or even more buses, as Hemingson argues – at roughly the same time even if MetroRapid were not happening.
Yours truly, several times in the past few years, bold added for emphasis:
Y’all may have fooled the Feds into buying you new rolling stock under the guise of BRT, but some of us aren’t buying it. The signal-holding device won’t be worth anything in the afternoon congestion on Guadalupe (it’s not the light in front of the bus holding it up; it’s the light six blocks down and the cars in front).
Rapid Bus is just a way for Cap Metro to get the Feds to pay for new rolling stock – it provides practically zero time savings over existing limited-stop #101 service. It’s not rapid; it’s not anything like what light rail would have been. The cars of all the people stuck from the next light up will still be in your way even if you can hold the light directly in front of the bus green a bit longer.
Rapid Bus continues to be a complete waste of time and money – our council members were right to put the kibosh on it the last time through. Investing this much money on a half-baked solution for the most important transit corridor in Austin is stupid, especially since this particular solution won’t actually work here (too many times the traffic backup goes far beyond the light immediately in front of the bus in question).
In other cities, and in a smarter Austin, we’d be seeing packed light rail trains run down Lamar and Guadalupe by now. There is no way rapid bus can provide enough mobility benefits here to be worth a tenth the investment you’re going to dump into this dead-end technology; and I hope our council members cut this program off again.
It’s time to demand that the residents of Austin, who provide almost all of Capital Metro’s funds, get some rail transit rather than spending our money providing train service to suburbs like Cedar Park that don’t even pay Capital Metro taxes. Rapid bus is an insult to the taxpayers of Austin, and it’s not going to be rapid.
Allow me to suggest to anybody with an interest in real governance rather than government-by-consultant that at this point Capital Metro’s paid spin people (including their de-facto PR people at the Alliance for Public Transportation) have no credibility on either Rapid Bus or the Red Line, and perhaps the media and city council should be listening to those of us who were right all along rather than those who were wrong but had the time to glad-hand about it.
All posts about Rapid Bus can be found in this category archive: Rapid Bus Ain’t Rapid
