Tag Archives: Rapid [sic] Bus

It’s time to talk about Rapid Bus again.

Posted on February 21, 2013 | 5 Comments

So the PR machine is out in force trying to make Rapid Bus sound great so people are distracted from the fact that the densest, most active, most vibrant corridor in the city – not only now but 40 years from now – isn’t going to get rail until the 2040s, if then. In the meantime, we’re planning on building another hugely subsidized line to suburbs that don’t pay any Capital Metro taxes; and an urban rail line to a “new urban” development that is new, but isn’t urban; and even when fully built out will have far less people and far less travel demand to the core than Guadalupe/Lamar do today.

Was that sentence long enough? I pay by the period.

Anyways, so Rapid Bus? Snakes like JMVC are pitching the hell out of it and talking about it in the same breath as light rail and commuter rail as “high capacity transit” – which is a way to make people in Central Austin think they’re getting equal or nearly-equal quality.

This is bullshit.

So apparently I need to do this again – and this time, for the maximum possible fairness, I’m going to start with the BEST POSSIBLE CASE for Rapid Bus – the Burnet/Lamar corridor, where no express service currently exists.

Joker-here-we-go

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Posted in 2008 Light Rail, Austin, Don't Hurt Us Mr. Krusee, We'll Do Whatever You Want, Funding of Transportation, High Grade Bile, I Told You So, metablog, Rapid Bus Ain't Rapid, Red Line Myths, Subsidies to Suburban Sprawl, Texas Republicans Hate Cities

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Thought Experiment

Posted on January 30, 2013 | Leave a comment

JMVC says this, paraphrased, a lot, and in fact, I completely agree with him:

“Rather than moving to the suburbs and expecting transit to be delivered to you, you should move to areas that are effectively served by transit already, because we’ll never be able to afford to serve all of the suburban sprawl with transit.”

Why, then, does he support rail decisions like these:

Instead of making that investment on places like Guadalupe and Lamar, where the areas are today that are dense – where people like me moved specifically so they could be served cheaply and effectively by transit? Where transit demand is so overwhelming today that the #1 bus which runs the most frequent service in town (requiring the smallest possible subsidy on the entire system) is overloaded and standing-room-only?

Why would we continue to invest in $20-plus-per-ride operating subsidies for people who knowingly chose to live in Cedar Park and Round Rock, who don’t even pay Capital Metro taxes, instead of making far more cost-effective capital investments in the core which could allow cheaper (operating cost, anyways) bus service to be spread out to more lower-density areas instead? Shouldn’t we logically give the people who chose to live in low-density the buses and the people who chose to live in high-density the trains?

Why doesn’t he walk the talk? Why doesn’t Capital Metro?

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Posted in 2008 Light Rail, Don't Hurt Us Mr. Krusee, We'll Do Whatever You Want, Transit in Austin, Transportation

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Quick response to spin session

Posted on January 11, 2013 | 1 Comment

I’m really swamped but did not want to let this one go.

Watch this video and go to item 4B (zoom forward to when JMVC talks Red Line and Rapid [sic] Bus).

JMVC tells the Rapid Bus tale to the UTC

JMVC tells the Rapid Bus tale to the UTC

Note the following points are made:

1. Red Line ridership is up (true!)

2. MetroRapid is coming. This is important because it’s the thing that connects the best parts of Austin; where the most travel demand exists (their words, but true!)

Then go ahead to the city’s MetroRapid presentation (4C) and see Jace Deloney and Richard Mackinnon ask JMVC some questions about Rapid [sic] Bus precluding light rail on this corridor.

Note that, despite claiming for years that yours truly was lying when I said Rapid Bus meant no light rail here, JMVC now says:

1. There will be no light rail here

2. I can’t comment specifically on why, but

3. You’re crazy to want light rail here because Rapid [sic] Bus is all this corridor demands and Capital Metro would never want to provide more than the corridor demanded in transit service (others may have other reasons for doing so, again, their words).

 

Now, UTC? Here’s where you dropped the ball after doing a decent job up to this point:

Nobody followed up and asked JMVC why they provided rail on the Red Line corridor – why that corridor somehow ‘demands rail’ and a corridor with 5-10x as much existing transit ridership and far more density along it now and in the foreseeable future doesn’t.

Paris_Tuileries_Garden_Facepalm_statue

Yeah, he’ll say “well, the voters told us to”, which is where you can say “The voters didn’t make that proposal; you did, with Mike Krusee but without any input from the City of Austin, who were caught completely flatfooted”. That might be too much past history for you. Let me know, and I can be your bad guy there who can’t let go of the past if you need me to. I’m a friggin’ hero that way.

Anyways, back to the point.

Hint: JMVC is spinning his ass off here to avoid getting caught in his own lie, told for many years; that Rapid [sic] Bus is an OK interim step; that it won’t get in the way of rail later. If he can now convince people that rail’s not needed there, he doesn’t have to admit that his previous claim was a lie. Spinning like this is his job. I wish he wasn’t a disingenuous dick about it everywhere and pretended like he was just a truth-teller, but fundamentally his job is to make Capital Metro look as good as possible. However: It’s the responsibility of those serving the public interest, like the UTC, to catch people like this out when they lie.

Guess what I would have done, back in my day on the UTC? Well, letting a paid spin artist get away with a lie that hurts the long-term public interest is not on the list. It’s uncomfortable to confront people. You will seem like, and people will call you, an asshole. Tough; it’s important to remember who you serve – you serve the citizens of Austin, not Capital Metro, and in this case Capital Metro has screwed the citizens of Austin and is about to get away with it.

JMVC got away with it

JMVC got away with it

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Posted in Austin, Don't Hurt Us Mr. Krusee, We'll Do Whatever You Want, I Told You So, Rapid Bus Ain't Rapid, Red Line Myths, Transit in Austin, Transportation

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Yes, Austin, You Can Trust M1EK

Posted on February 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

Statesman, over the weekend:

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.

[...]

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:

http://m1ek.dahmus.org/?p=629

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).

http://m1ek.dahmus.org/?p=706

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.

 

http://m1ek.dahmus.org/?p=509

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

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Posted in I Told You So, Rapid Bus Ain't Rapid

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Rapid [sic] Bus Fact Check: Will It Improve Frequency?

Posted on October 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

Please excuse the quick and multiple likely edits. Trying to squeeze this in just a few minutes.

The PR guys at Capital Metro have surfaced again – trying to convince us that MetroRapid is a real improvement for Central Austin (you know, where light rail should have gone). One of the claims gaining traction lately (in addition to the disproved claim that it will provide measurable speed and reliability benefits – please excuse link to old site but I have not yet imported the last 6 months of posts here) is that frequency in the core will improve dramatically.

Pure and simple: This is bullshit.

Current service on the #1 bus during the day is every 12 minutes (once you leave the core, very generously defined as the North Lamar Transit Center to the South Lamar Transit Center, it splits into 2 routes, each one of which runs every 24 minutes).

Full #1 schedule here: http://www.capmetro.org/riding/schedules.asp?f1=001

 

Here’s a snippet:

Note that the #1 runs every 12 minutes here. This continues all day until 2:45 PM, when it switches to every 13 minutes (due to worse traffic in the PM); only reducing frequency below that after 7:15 or so – gradually to 15 minutes and then 20 minutes.

Now what about the #101, you know, the bus route that the Rapid [sic] Bus is actually replacing?

Full schedule here: http://www.capmetro.org/riding/schedules.asp?f1=101

Here’s a snippet:

A little tricker since only some of the trips go all the way to the South Congress TC, but it does run at 15 minute frequency basically all day long.

What does this mean? It means that in an average hour, if you are on the #1 corridor anywhere in Central Austin, you will see 5 #1 buses and 4 #101 buses go by. For instance, this is what you would see southbound between 7:00 and 8:00 AM at The Triangle, where you can pick up either bus:

From Capital Metro’s interactive data:

101: 07:04am 07:24am 07:29am 07:44am

1L: 07:10am 07:34am 07:58am

1M: 07:22am 07:46am

Or, arranged in order:

 

Now here’s what frequency might look like with Rapid [sic] Bus if we run the 801 every 10 minutes and eliminate, let’s say, half of the #1 trips (Capital Metro is saying all #101 and some #1 trips will be eliminated):

 

Does anybody here think 8 is more than 9? Or, if you don’t like which 1L/1M trips I proposed for elimination, make your own choice – keep the first and third 1L and lose the second one; and keep the opposite 1Ms, and you still end up with 9. Oops.

Even if you kept all the #1 trips (i.e. did NOT take Capital Metro at their word that they plan on reducing #1 service), and you end up with 11 trips versus 9 – hardly a major improvement in frequency.

 

Now, will the service improve frequency for users of the #3? Yes, a little bit, but this is not the primary corridor being advertised – nor is it where most of the current travel demand exists.

So, on this fact check, Capital Metro fails. MetroRapid will NOT dramatically increase frequency in the urban core.

PS: This is the kind of analysis you should expect out of the Alliance for Public Transportation – who purports to be an independent voice for public transportation in our region but are really nothing but uncritical cheerleading lap-dogs for Capital Metro. I have the guts but not the time; they have the time but apparently not the guts. If you want more of this kind of stuff, ask THEM why they’re not doing their jobs, OK?

 

 

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Posted in Rapid Bus Ain't Rapid, Uncategorized

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