Guided Busways

[Jim606]

As a follow on from Guided Busways, Bus Rapid Transit or BRT creep is a phenomena whereby local councils set out with all the best intension to build a network. Unfortunately, the money then runs out and the whole system get paired back. There is even a dedicated Wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit_creep However, this citymetric.com article really highlights the issue;

Imagine you’re the mayor of a fair sized city. You want to improve your public transport network: to improve the local economy, to get traffic off the roads and, if you’re honest with yourself, because you’ve always loved London’s Tube map and you’ve been whiling away idle hours drawing versions for your own city since you were six years old.

There’s a problem, though. You can’t afford to build an underground metro. A light-rail network would cost a fraction of the cost of a subway – possibly as little as 10 per cent. But, when you check the budget, you realise you can’t afford to build one of those either. So, you’re stuck. Traffic will get worse, employers won’t be able to recruit staff, your tax base will fall, and then one day you’ll find yourself hounded out of office and possibly tarred and feathered in the central business district. What you really need is a way of building a metro system, with all the reliability and speed that implies, without having to spend all that money digging tunnels and laying down rails. If only. If only...

This was roughly the dilemma that faced Jaime Lerner, the mayor of the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba in the early 70s. (I say “roughly” because I’ve never actually spoken to him. For all I know he hates the tube map.) And Lerner found a way of getting a metro system on the cheap: much cheaper than a tram; much, much cheaper than a subway. It revels in the distinctly unsexy name of “bus rapid transit” (BRT).

The upside

Buses provide essential transport links in many cities, but are generally seen as the poor cousin of subways and trams. It’s for good reasons, too. They’re unreliable, suffering from traffic jams just as much as private cars without any of the sense of control. They also stop frequently, making progress slow, even if the road is clear. They’re also impermanent: you can settle in an area, confident that nobody is going to rip your tube line out of the ground and thus wreck your commute. Rely on a bus route, though, and you may wake up one morning to find it doesn’t exist any more.

BRT systems do away with these problems. They use segregated lanes, inaccessible to other vehicles, to improve reliability (no more getting stuck in traffic jams). They’re often hooked up to the local traffic lights grid, to give them priority at junctions (no more waiting for the lights to change).

They also stop less frequently, and tend to characterise their stopping points as stations (buildings with names, facilities and so forth) rather than stops (bus shelters without them). Throw in floors level with the station platforms and ticketing systems in which you pay your fare before boarding, and you’ve got something that looks a lot like a proper metro network, without any of the expense of putting down rails.

The downside

So if BRT is so great – if you can get all the benefits of a metro system at a fraction of the price – then why hadn’t every city built one? Well, they’re still low capacity compared to a proper subway system. Each train on London’s tube can carry 700-800 people. The articulated buses used on Bogotá’s TransMilenio carry around 150. What’s more, while they’re cheaper than a full blown metro, they still require spending on infrastructure: segregated lanes, redesigning junctions and so forth. In cities where space is at a premium, it can be difficult to make a case for giving over entire chunks of road to one category of bus.

Some cities are getting around that by putting chunks of their BRT routes in tunnel. But at the point you’re going to the effort of digging a tunnel, you start to wonder whether those cost savings are still stacking up.

This points towards another more political problem with BRT: it’s prone to cost cutting in a way that can render the whole exercise pointless.
With BRT, though, it’s possible to nibble away at it. Does it need to be segregated for its whole route? Wouldn’t part be enough? Perhaps to save space, it can share some of its lane with private traffic. Does it really need new stations? Wouldn’t the existing bus shelters do?

And then, before you know it, what you’ve got is basically a bus. Which you just spent quite a lot of money on for no very good reason.

This phenomenon of gradual cost cutting which can render a BRT line pointless has a name: bus rapid transit creep. It’s not a theoretical problem, either. The East London Transit (ELT) was originally meant to be a fully segregated network linking the Barking Riverside development zone to civilisation. In the event, though, the bits of the network that are segregated are mostly those in the development zone, where traffic is low anyway. On the busy main road betwen Barking and Ilford, the ELT shares space with every other vehicle. The stops are the same as any other bus stop, too.

[the cheesecake man]

As a follow on from Guided Busways, Bus Rapid Transit or BRT creep is a phenomena whereby local councils set out with all the best intension to build a network. Unfortunately, the money then runs out and the whole system get paired back.

Yep. Two BRT routes from Sheffield to Rotherham were proposed and designed. All that actually happened was a few token bus lanes and half a mile of road bypassing M1 J34 (open to all traffic).

[KeithW]

However, when a car does get trapped, the busway is closed until the car is recovered, since the car cannot simply reverse out. Not sure how you get around that if you deem it essential to prevent cars from using it. Maybe transponder-operated bollards might work?

They tried that on the bus gates in Cambridge and the guided busway , people still kept following buses through and the rising bollard usually totalled the car.

https://www.carpark-barriers-turnstiles ... ed-by-car/

[mikehindsonevans]

However, when a car does get trapped, the busway is closed until the car is recovered, since the car cannot simply reverse out. Not sure how you get around that if you deem it essential to prevent cars from using it. Maybe transponder-operated bollards might work?

Which if you watch the various videos online seem to just end up severely damaging any car that collides with them. I'm not quite sure what you can do about drivers who think driving down a concrete busway is a good idea. Mandatory retest once they're pulled out I think.

The advantage of a bollard is that you could make it highly visible as an obstruction at the very entrance to the busway. The car traps are not so visible and are situated a little way down the track. As I say, perhaps there's no easy answer.

Using the specific examples around Cambridge (daily watching of how things work here) : a car driver would need to be quite dumb (is that a sufficiently derisory adjective without anyone taking offence?) to drive up to a wide clear hole in the concrete Busway (said hole being so wide that just the front and outer rear wheels of the bus can span it) and ignore the socking great triangular traffic sign saying "CAR TRAP".

I am throwing my hat in with the "mandatory re-test" crew.

Oh, the bollards by the train station are now permanently left down. It has helped to speed up the buses.

One additional benefit of the guide-wheels is that buses arrive alongside the bus stops perfectly positioned for boarding. Additionally, since speed monitor displays were deployed, no Busway buses have missed the channels. The two early spectacular crashes have not been repeated.

[KeithW]

Oh, the bollards by the train station are now permanently left down. It has helped to speed up the buses.

One additional benefit of the guide-wheels is that buses arrive alongside the bus stops perfectly positioned for boarding. Additionally, since speed monitor displays were deployed, no Busway buses have missed the channels. The two early spectacular crashes have not been repeated.

The rising bollards on the bus gates were also removed, one reason was that they were rather temperamental and easily damaged when cars hit them and the powers that be realised that all that was really needed was an ANPR camera to send penalty notices without all the nasty publicity of wrecking cars. I saw one car hit the bollards on Bridge Street and my guess would be the car was a total loss. The bollard ripped out the sump and much of the front suspension as well as doing major body damage and of course a large quantity of oil and antifreeze was released. Because the driver was tailgating the bus it made contact as the front bumper had already passed over it.

As I recall the final straw was a driver who had a heart attack and and died at the scene after hitting the rising bollards on Emmanuel Road near New Square.

[Herned]

The Cambridge-St.Ives-March railway was twin track throughout but once the March-St.Ives section was closed, the remainder had one track removed but all the infrastructure remained as a twin track railway.

Mea culpa, I only remember seeing it, and photos of it in it's disused state

[roadtester]

Oh, the bollards by the train station are now permanently left down. It has helped to speed up the buses.

One additional benefit of the guide-wheels is that buses arrive alongside the bus stops perfectly positioned for boarding. Additionally, since speed monitor displays were deployed, no Busway buses have missed the channels. The two early spectacular crashes have not been repeated.

The rising bollards on the bus gates were also removed, one reason was that they were rather temperamental and easily damaged when cars hit them and the powers that be realised that all that was really needed was an ANPR camera to send penalty notices without all the nasty publicity of wrecking cars. I saw one car hit the bollards on Bridge Street and my guess would be the car was a total loss. The bollard ripped out the sump and much of the front suspension as well as doing major body damage and of course a large quantity of oil and antifreeze was released. Because the driver was tailgating the bus it made contact as the front bumper had already passed over it.

As I recall the final straw was a driver who had a heart attack and and died at the scene after hitting the rising bollards on Emmanuel Road near New Square.

I don't go into Cambridge much these days despite living nearby, so I'm not very up to date.

However, when I worked there in 1998-2002, I saw a number of cars coming a cropper on the rising bollards - usually the aftermath rather than the bollard strike itself.

One I remember particularly was a Nissan full of very glum looking pensioners. The front half of the car was impaled on a fully raised bollard, making it difficult for the occupants to get out.

As Keith suggests, the impact of under-car damage can be immense. Not quite the same thing, but as I have related before, my first Renault Fluence was written off after hitting a piece of debris in the road, which punched the powertrain off its mountings and snapped off a driveshaft, even though it was pretty much completely undamaged externally. I think the bollards would be worse, albeit we are talking about lower speeds.

[Ruperts Trooper]

The Cambridge-St.Ives-March railway was twin track throughout but once the March-St.Ives section was closed, the remainder had one track removed but all the infrastructure remained as a twin track railway.

Mea culpa, I only remember seeing it, and photos of it in it's disused state

In it's day, it was a busy line with regular coal trains from Yorkshire to London, avoiding the ECML

[B1040]

You would think that "no entry" "no motorised vehicles (except buses)" and "buses only" would give a clue.
I suspect with the bus gate incidents it's tunnel vision, they see a bus going in their direction and blindly follow it. I doubt many pensioners are planning to pull a fast one, but most of them will not have experienced them before, so don't believe they exist.
With the car traps, it's probably a mix of pulling a fast one, confusion by too many signs (if it's in Orchard Park in the dark), and failure to believe you can have a no entry sign in the middle of nowhere (or the top end of Milton Road)

[KeithW]

You would think that "no entry" "no motorised vehicles (except buses)" and "buses only" would give a clue.
I suspect with the bus gate incidents it's tunnel vision, they see a bus going in their direction and blindly follow it. I doubt many pensioners are planning to pull a fast one, but most of them will not have experienced them before, so don't believe they exist.
With the car traps, it's probably a mix of pulling a fast one, confusion by too many signs (if it's in Orchard Park in the dark), and failure to believe you can have a no entry sign in the middle of nowhere (or the top end of Milton Road)

The large signs on the bus gates were a but of give away as were the Stop Line and the signs saying Rising Bollards ahead. Not to mention the visible bollards on the other side of the road. The incident I saw did not involve a pensioner but a middle aged man in a smart new car. I thought then and still do now that he figured if he followed closely behind the bus he could get through. He was wrong.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.20913 ... authuser=0

[B1040]

The large signs on the bus gates were a but of give away as were the Stop Line and the signs saying Rising Bollards ahead. Not to mention the visible bollards on the other side of the road. The incident I saw did not involve a pensioner but a middle aged man in a smart new car. I thought then and still do now that he figured if he followed closely behind the bus he could get through. He was wrong.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.20913 ... authuser=0

If you tailgate too closely, you can't see signs and lines.
Even if you get through on one side of the exclusion zone, you still have to get out of the other end!

We know that!
I cycled along your streetview only this afternoon.

[Al__S]

Oh, the bollards by the train station are now permanently left down. It has helped to speed up the buses.

One additional benefit of the guide-wheels is that buses arrive alongside the bus stops perfectly positioned for boarding. Additionally, since speed monitor displays were deployed, no Busway buses have missed the channels. The two early spectacular crashes have not been repeated.

The rising bollards on the bus gates were also removed, one reason was that they were rather temperamental and easily damaged when cars hit them and the powers that be realised that all that was really needed was an ANPR camera to send penalty notices without all the nasty publicity of wrecking cars. I saw one car hit the bollards on Bridge Street and my guess would be the car was a total loss. The bollard ripped out the sump and much of the front suspension as well as doing major body damage and of course a large quantity of oil and antifreeze was released. Because the driver was tailgating the bus it made contact as the front bumper had already passed over it.

As I recall the final straw was a driver who had a heart attack and and died at the scene after hitting the rising bollards on Emmanuel Road near New Square.

The actual reason for the replacement of the city centre scheme bollards with ANPR was far more prosaic- they were unable to source any more compatible radio tags, the manufacturer had gone out of business.

[Jim606]

As a follow on from Guided Busways, Bus Rapid Transit or BRT creep is a phenomena whereby local councils set out with all the best intension to build a network. Unfortunately, the money then runs out and the whole system get paired back.

Yep. Two BRT routes from Sheffield to Rotherham were proposed and designed. All that actually happened was a few token bus lanes and half a mile of road bypassing M1 J34 (open to all traffic).

Very interesting points. Rapid Bus Transit is the next 'big thing' touted for Colchester, but no-one at the local council seems to recognize that when the money runs out this is what happens. As the City Metric article pointed out after spending a lot of money you've basically still got a 'standard system' with fancy coloured buses, stops with names and a few hundred meters of dedicated lanes.

[KeithW]

If you tailgate too closely, you can't see signs and lines.
Even if you get through on one side of the exclusion zone, you still have to get out of the other end!

We know that!
I cycled along your streetview only this afternoon.

Tailgating that closely is ALWAYS a bad idea.

Getting out the other end is actually very easy unless they have changed it recently. You just take a left and drive down Round Church Street, at the bottom you turn right on Park Street and then left onto Jesus Lane and you are free and clear. They have to let cars out of the Park Street car park

[B1040]

I suppose a complete (proper) one way street would solve it.
Almost nobody disobeys a full one way street. No entry signs with exclusions seem to muddle a bigger (but still tiny) section of the population.

[medgoode]

Can you get a criminal record for going through a Bus Gate? If not, doesn't that just make it a really expensive toll road?

[B1040]

My understanding is that nobody has been prosecuted for putting their car in a trap (this derives from the Cambridge News) website a fee months back).
I have no knowledge of whether the cameras are actually clocking people or not.

[someone]

Can you get a criminal record for going through a Bus Gate? If not, doesn't that just make it a really expensive toll road?

Only if you do not pay the fine, bus lanes fines etc. are civil matters.

[Mark Hewitt]

Can you get a criminal record for going through a Bus Gate? If not, doesn't that just make it a really expensive toll road?

Only if you do not pay the fine, bus lanes fines etc. are civil matters.

I would imagine the fine is at least £60 if not more? So a very expensive toll road indeed.

Reminds me of the likes of diplomatic staff in London using diplomatic immunity to not bother paying parking fines or the congestion charge, as with them being immune from criminal prosecution they can just get away with it.

[Ruperts Trooper]

Can you get a criminal record for going through a Bus Gate? If not, doesn't that just make it a really expensive toll road?

Only if you do not pay the fine, bus lanes fines etc. are civil matters.

I would imagine the fine is at least £60 if not more? So a very expensive toll road indeed.

Reminds me of the likes of diplomatic staff in London using diplomatic immunity to not bother paying parking fines or the congestion charge, as with them being immune from criminal prosecution they can just get away with it.

The bus lane penalty in Birmingham is £30 if paid within the initial time period.