(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 460: Sexy World of Bus Speed and Reliability

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast we’re at the Mpact conference in Phoenix Arizona and joined by Tom Brennan, Senior Principal at Nelson Nygaard. We talk about the sexy world of bus speed and reliability, how agency can invest for effectiveness, and future proofing routes for the long term.

To listen to this episode, check it out a Streetsblog USA or in the hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood (1m 56s):
Tom Brennan, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Tom Brennan (2m 19s):
Thanks Jeff, it’s a real pleasure to be here.

Jeff Wood (2m 21s):
Well, before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Tom Brennan (2m 24s):
Yeah, so again, Tom Brennan, I’m a senior principal at Nelson Nygaard Consulting. We’re a multimodal transportation planning and and design firm with a huge focus on transit and transit planning and design. I grew up in, in central New York, actually a small town boy and when I reflect back on it, it’s a bit odd that I became an urban planner working mostly in large cities because I grew up in a small town in the Finger Lakes. Went to college in central New York, also in a small college town after college, went off and joined the Peace Corps and living also in a very small rural village. Yeah, it may have actually been my only true car-free living experience for two years because I was in the very deep bush of West Africa where there were literally no cars.

Tom Brennan (3m 13s):
Yeah, walking was the only form of mobility, but following college, got interested in trying to apply some of my experience there and came to Oregon to attend the University of Oregon Master’s program in policy and planning. My head space at that point was really that I was gonna focus on rural resource planning. Oregon had a really good program at the time because there was a lot of transition from the old timber and extraction economies to trying to find new economic opportunities. But during my time there met a guy named Terry Moore, you may know, retired recently I think from Eco Northwest. Terry was an economist but had a good transportation planning mind and he taught a course on the transportation land use connection following up on a publication he had put out shortly before that.

Tom Brennan (4m 1s):
And that was really my big aha moment. I think making the connection between our transportation systems and particularly our car oriented culture and the many negative externalities of our driving culture on emissions, safety, social equity, but perhaps first and foremost just the inefficient use of space across our cities. And that was really the moment that that sort of launched me into a transportation career. And the rest is kind of history. I’ve spent most of my career in transportation at Nelson Nygard. So I’ve been at the firm now for 24 years, worked on a lot of different aspects of our practice, but really all of it centered around transit and public transportation.

Jeff Wood (4m 45s):
That initial kind of introduction to transit and transportation is interesting. But did you think about it at all before that? I mean it might’ve been tangential or just kind of outside, but then when you got to it you’re like, oh, this reminds me of this kind of experience that I had. Or when you maybe went to a city and saw a transit or is, was there any like kind of formative spot in your mind where that might’ve started like as a little tiny kindling of the fire that’s burning now?

Tom Brennan (5m 11s):
Absolutely. Both my parents were city people. My mom grew up in the Twin Cities and my dad was from Boston. He was a an Irish boy from Southie. So all my dad’s family was in Boston and we’d visited three or four times every year. So spent a lot of time riding the tea in Boston and really got introduced to transit. So it was kind of a real thing of excitement and wonder for me. Yeah, coming from a small town to the city as a kid, my uncle worked for the MBTA his whole career in several jobs, but was a operations supervisor for the t. I didn’t really know what that meant as a kid, but I remember thinking, wow, he gets to ride trains and and hang out with the people working on trains all day.

Tom Brennan (5m 53s):
And I thought that was a very cool thing. Yeah, so that’s probably the sort of most formative Shaping of my childhood. Yeah, memories around transit.

Jeff Wood (6m 2s):
It’s funny how that can shape you a little bit. I mean, I just remember when I was a kid coming to the Bay area and visiting my grandparents on both sides and we would take Bart and you know, I just kind of remember it and my dad took the bus to work every day. But it was like very interesting to just kind of see how that shapes how you see things if somebody related to you. And then I find out later that one of my great-great-grandparents was a cable car conductor in San Francisco like a long time ago. Oh neat. And so just little things like that, I’m like, oh yeah, I was meant to, I was meant to do this. Right. And so you were probably meant to do this as well. Well I wanted to have you on to chat about the Sexy world of bus improvements, but I’m wondering what you can tell us about buses generally and why they’re an important part of the transit system of North America.

Tom Brennan (6m 40s):
So I think bus transit is really the, the foundation of transit in most of our cities. So other than Boston and New York and kind of the legacy systems on the east coast, most of our transit has built up around bus based transit and certainly in the west, which is where I do most of my work, that’s very much the case. So we’re seeing a lot of exciting rail expansion still in a lot of light rail construction over the last 20 or 30 years, which is really the foundation of this conference that we’re talking from today. But I think most of the west coast systems, even the systems that have more legacy rail like Muni and San Francisco, you know, the majority of their ridership historically has been on the bus.

Tom Brennan (7m 22s):
And I think it’s an exciting time now where we’re really seeing a lot of investment in making those bus services better. Not just from a service standpoint but also from a capital investment standpoint. Thinking about how we can improve the passenger experience and how we can improve bus speed and Reliability as buses operate on city streets, navigate traffic and that piece of the bus experience is what I’ve been spending a lot of time working on. My colleagues at Nelson Niger have really built a practice around over the last several years.

Jeff Wood (7m 54s):
How much do you think about ridership specifically in that context?

Tom Brennan (7m 58s):
We’re always thinking about ridership. Yeah, I mean ridership is probably the best metric of how any transit system is doing, right? If we’re able to attract people to our buses, trains, and other transit services that ultimately delivers the access mobility, social and environmental benefits that all our transit agency partners are working towards. I think one of the things that we have seen coming out of the pandemic and really monitoring transit use and performance through the pandemic is that there are certain populations that are really reliant on transit much more so than others. And being able to look at some of that data, what routes in an individual system maintain strong ridership during the pandemic and what types of land uses and destinations are those serving often warehouse jobs or hospital jobs, some of our most critical jobs, but also some of the jobs that are connecting people who are, are working in lower income, lower wage jobs, wage jobs to their destinations, I think has really become a foundation about how a lot of our clients are thinking about deployment of the limited resources they have towards transit.

Tom Brennan (9m 5s):
And really also thinking about the temporal needs of travel for those folks which are often not aligned with the historic nine to five peaks, which when you think about an office market, you know, in the last several decades that’s when a lot of transit agencies were orienting their peak services. But when we look at the, the profile of some of those other rider groups, many of ’em are working shift jobs that start very early in the morning or maybe start in the afternoon and go later into the evening. And so really thinking about providing high quality service for a longer span of the day so that transit becomes a reliable way to, to access jobs and services, not just during that peak and midday period, but across the day is really important.

Jeff Wood (9m 47s):
How much of that is an opportunity though? Because if you don’t have to provide those peak services anymore, like the express buses that you only use, you know the, you have one run or something along those lines and it gets really expensive ’cause of the drivers and how they’re allocated and those types of things, how much of a opportunity is that though because you can reallocate that service to routes that you know are gonna need that kind of frequency or need more service overall?

Tom Brennan (10m 10s):
Yeah, I think it’s a real opportunity and I think we’re seeing a lot of our transit agency clients are taking advantage of that limiting some of the deployment of of peak services, which tend to be very expensive because those are not efficient shift schedules for the transit agencies to book operators for and also often require additional fleet, you know, adding a couple trips during the peak. Yeah, peak of the peak can be quite expensive from a fleet standpoint because often agencies have to buy additional buses extending, you know, higher levels, but consistent levels of service throughout the day actually allow agencies to deploy both their operating and fleet resources a lot more effectively. Often.

Jeff Wood (10m 47s):
Yeah. And often they have the different types of buses too. Usually commuter buses yeah, tend to be kind of more greyhound ish like versus like a city bus 40 to 60 foot bus. So that’s really interesting kind of thinking about what the future of purchasing might be as well. Like there’s a lot of destinations you could go with that thought, but I just think that’s really interesting too. Yeah,

Tom Brennan (11m 4s):
Absolutely.

Jeff Wood (11m 5s):
Well so what does speed mean when we’re talking about the bus? Because I think, you know, one of the things we know about buses is not that they’re slow, but they just kind of, they’re going from stop to stop and they have a purpose to bring people between different destinations. But I’m wondering what the importance is of the topic of speed more generally.

Tom Brennan (11m 21s):
Yeah, so when we talk about this practice area, we often talk about it in terms of bus speed and reliability. Another way to think about it is reduction in delay. So I think one of the most frustrating things for transit customers is the lack of Reliability on bus services that are operating in mixed traffic. And our subject to all the various things that happen on an urban city streets, accidents, delays from congestion, maybe something goes wrong in a traffic signal and so you know, the buses are backed up. So, but if you’re the bus customer waiting at the stop for the bus to show up, you don’t know what’s happening downstream and why that bus is delayed, you just know it’s not showing up and that’s an inconvenience for your day.

Tom Brennan (12m 5s):
And we certainly know from research that the penalty of waiting is much more prominent in people’s minds than the penalty once they’re on the bus. So that reliability piece of it and the ability for bus services to adhere to a schedule is a very important part of this practice. The speed of the bus is obviously important as well and we really tend to think of that as the, the average speed across the course of a trip or a line. But from a technical standpoint, when we try to analyze and look at that, we’re often looking at it from the standpoint of where is the bus delayed. So we have a number of practices and approaches to quantifying and thinking about delay. Not to get too wonky, you

Jeff Wood (12m 44s):
Can get as wonky as you want, you can get as wonky as you want on

Tom Brennan (12m 47s):
This show. you know, a lot of our clients are, are thinking about delay in slightly different manners. But typically when we think about delay, we’re looking at the difference between what the travel time is for a bus between two points at the most congested period or maybe what we’d call like the 80th or 90th percentile level of congestion. So not the worst of the worst but almost the worst time of day. And then the most uncongested time of day. So often time we’re, we’re looking at say the 80th percentile travel time versus the 20th percentile travel time. And then, so thinking about the difference between those as measure of delay and different agencies have different ways of thinking about it ways.

Tom Brennan (13m 26s):
Another measure we use is variability in travel time. So how consistent is the travel time of a bus from run to run across the course of a day or you know, across the course of a week. And again, when that variability is low, that tends to equate to high customer satisfaction. The bus is likely to show up on time, buses aren’t likely to launch or have, you know, several buses showing up in sequence and then a long gap. So those are a couple ways that we think about it and luckily for us there’s a lot of great data available. As you know, most buses have GPS systems on them which collect huge trove of data. And one of the things our team at Nelson Nygard has been doing some great work on for the last several years as building really highly accessible tools for our clients to look more carefully at bus delay, where it’s happening, when it’s happening across the system and to really dig into that on specific routes as well.

Tom Brennan (14m 23s):
So our teams built a dashboard type tool that we call our BA or bus delay analysis tool. This tool can pull, you know, really, really deep data from GPS based pings along the bus route and then creates these really nice dashboard type tools where an agency can look system-wide to see sort of different levels of delay or dig in on a route and kind of look at for this individual segment, what’s the delay profile across the day, you know, is it always delayed during the PMP because it delayed all day? And those tools have really become sort of a foundation for a lot of our work with our transit agency partners around bus speed and reliability.

Jeff Wood (15m 3s):
I’m curious too, like you get to the point where you’re collecting data, you get to the point where you have interventions that you know, maybe speed up the bus and reliability overall, but if an agency is at the very starting point, like what gets them into thinking like, we need to do something to change the game because something’s not right. So how do they like start the process?

Tom Brennan (15m 23s):
I think part of it’s really defining the problem and doing so clearly. So really helping transit agency leadership understand what the impacts of delay are and what solving the delay challenge can mean for transit agencies. So from an operations side, you know historically in agencies that haven’t been doing bus funeral reliability improvements, you know, scheduling teams are continually challenged with understanding runtimes for their buses and then working to change schedules to manage those. And we see a lot of, you know, a lot of agencies experiencing significant year over year increases in bus travel time due to that.

Tom Brennan (16m 3s):
And those have real and significant costs to them. So oftentimes just quantifying the cost of bus delay to an agency is really important. We’ve done some of this work with Steven Newhouse and his team up at TransLink in Vancouver BC. They’re doing some great work on bus priority and really good work on quantifying that problem and building the case their leadership. So taking the, the pandemic year or two out since 2014, we’ve seen, you know, consistently about a $2 million operating increase to operate the same level of service in the Vancouver metro area. If you look at that cumulatively then over the last 10 years, that equates to I think about $155 million increase in operating costs just to operate the same level of service.

Tom Brennan (16m 51s):
So when you start to add up those numbers, you can see why agency leaders would be interesting in finding ways to reduce those costs.

Jeff Wood (16m 60s):
Is that congestion and the idea of future traffic, right? Thinking of it over that long period of time because you know, the bus has a set schedule and it has a set route and then over time it just gets slowed and slowed and slowed as more and more cars are on the road or more and more other delays are there. I mean it could be online commerce, it could be like you said, collisions, it could be any number of things, but that idea of future traffic is really, I feel like an important point to all this.

Tom Brennan (17m 26s):
Yeah, I mean, and to some degree not only are you solving immediate problems and making life better for customers who are using services currently, but to your point, you’re protecting against the future, right? Because if you don’t do anything, that reduction in travel time and commensurate cost is just gonna continue to go up at a fairly straight line. So if you think about kind of the ultimate in speed and reliability as a fully protected guideway, you’d have no net increase in cost from delay in that environment. So you know, really thinking as bus speed reliability as an incremental set of steps to not achieve that level of priority but to achieve some of the same benefits. The other thing about transit operations that I think is important to recognize is that the operating costs of a bus are somewhat lumpy.

Tom Brennan (18m 9s):
Lumpy in that, in that if you, so you have a route that operates every 50 minutes and takes 50 minutes for a bus to run that would take roughly five buses and you introduce just a small amount of additional delay to that route, your cost doesn’t go up incrementally, it goes up pretty substantially. ’cause adding up another bus to cover that route, to maintain that same level of headway, you know, is a full 20% additional cost even though your, you know, your increase in additional travel time might only be a couple percent. So a little bit of travel time benefit can go a really long way in terms of allowing schedulers to maintain headways with the same number of, of buses and operators.

Jeff Wood (18m 53s):
It’s interesting because, you know, thinking about how we think about scheduling, but also budgets, right? How much money there is and how much, you know, there’s a lot of cutting of service and those types of things. But if you make these kind of incremental improvements and capital improvements, not just the bus but in capital improvements, maybe it’s like these small things and we’ll talk about that in a second, but I’m just thinking about, you know, how you sell this like politically from that perspective because it’s interesting to think about how much things cost, how much things might cost in the future, what are gonna be the capital costs that can be spent that can reduce those operating costs over time. It’s like very, it’s very juggling. Yeah. In that way it’s not lumpy like you mentioned, but it’s like juggling, like you’re juggling a number of different things but you do have to make investments one way or another.

Jeff Wood (19m 37s):
Yeah,

Tom Brennan (19m 37s):
And I think, you know, other reasons why reducing transit matters and can be a really powerful tool when you think about it on a system wide level is you’re potentially impacting many, many riders with relatively small investments. So we’ve certainly seen cases where individual transit priority improvements that address a real gnarly delay problem in a system where you’ve got multiple buses going through a corridor serving multiple routes. If you can unlock one or two really critical intersections or you know, for example in Portland where they have been working on bus speed and reliability for a number of years with our team, the bridge heads crossing the Willamette River are critical points of delay.

Tom Brennan (20m 23s):
you know, many buses coming into and out of downtown, across the Hawthorne Bridge, Burnside Bridge and those are also places where cyclists and traffic and trucks are all trying to cram through that funnel. So there are, there are points of, of really heightened delay. There’s also a tremendous amount of passengers coming in and out of downtown via those. So some of the pretty small bus priority projects that PBO and TriMed have implemented in those locations have led to really significant improvements in overall passenger travel time reduction or travel time savings. And if you look at those, you know, quantify those benefits against whole BRT projects, you know, they can actually start to start to have some equivalent benefits just in terms of the amount of passenger travel time saves, but obviously they’re, you know, much smaller projects and, and projects that are much easier and and quicker to implement as well.

Tom Brennan (21m 16s):
So you think about a system now and maybe you take those top 10 or 15 points of delay that are real bottlenecks not just for one route but for many routes. And you can, you can piece together a package of projects that are again, probably cheaper than a single arterial bus, rapid transit corridor or have a really powerful impact in improving the transit system for, for many, many people.

Jeff Wood (21m 38s):
That’s another question I have is there’s so much attention on like full corridor or bus rapid transit projects and the amount of money they take obviously, and there’s a ribbon cutting and it’s all fancy and happy and, and people are excited about it and you know, van Ness and San Francisco shows kind of the benefits of that. But then you can take that whatever, 500, 250, 500 million that you spent on that line and if you make some of these pinpoint improvements, you might be able to actually improve the whole system. And with limited budgets, I’m wondering is there a benefit and I, and I hate pitting projects that should all be done against each other because that’s silly, but there’s also, you know, that political calculus of like, this isn’t as sexy but it does a lot and there’s like little tiny interventions you can make, but then there’s this one big project that could do a lot for this corridor and it sometimes it feels like these trade-offs that agencies might be having.

Jeff Wood (22m 28s):
They shouldn’t be having them obviously, in my opinion, but they happen. And so I’m wondering like what the difference might be between, like you said, those bigger kind of fancier, longer, you know, distance bus, rapid transit projects versus the little improvements that actually can make a big difference.

Tom Brennan (22m 43s):
Yeah, and I a hundred percent agree with you that we shouldn’t be pitting the two against each other. And I think really if we look at the agencies across North America that are doing the most to invest in quality bus service, they’re doing both. Yeah. So I look at King County Metro and their partners at City of Seattle both are working very hard on the rapid ride program, which is a tremendous arterial BRT program of both the city of Seattle and King County have independent bus speed and Reliability programs and you know, sometimes those bus speed and Reliability programs are happening in corridors that are future bus rapid transit corridors as well. TransLink up in Vancouver. BC again has really built a tremendous bus based program after decades of really focusing heavily on rail investment.

Tom Brennan (23m 30s):
Dan Freeman and Steven Newhouse and have his group have built up a really great program that again has sort of multiple levels of investment. They have their rapid bus program, which is, is comparable to Rapid ride. It’s fairly light arterial BRT, but you know, having great success in attracting riders, those are corridor based branded investments. But Steven’s also building a really powerhouse bus speed and reliability program as well. And they’re, you know, now working on thinking about sort of the higher order BRT program as well. So they’re, again, they’re operating kind of at all levels of bus investment and you know, there is, there is interplay things change corridors may get prioritized or deprioritized. And for those corridors that aren’t gonna receive full corridor investment, those are still great candidates for some more tactical must be Reliability interventions.

Tom Brennan (24m 17s):
So I think it’s a great question and I, I would certainly encourage agencies to be thinking about all of the above.

Jeff Wood (24m 23s):
I think it has to kind of go to the MPO level because a lot of building like an mp like a, a highway interchange is like a rounding error for them on the roadside. But it could be, you know, massive in terms of if you put a hundred million or 200 million. Yeah,

Tom Brennan (24m 36s):
Yeah. And certainly in Portland, Metro’s been a key partner with TriMet in the local jurisdictions and thinking about their better bus program and bus speed and reliability program. I know MTC in the Bay area is involved in, in thinking about bus speed and reliability as well in terms of partnerships. And not to delve into personal story, but I think one of the things that I

Jeff Wood (24m 55s):
Like personal stories,

Tom Brennan (24m 57s):
One of the things that really got me interested in this work was an opportunity to do the Seattle Department of Transportation’s first ever transit master plan. So back under Grace Kin’s leadership, when she was the director at the Seattle Department of Transportation, she kind of stepped back and, and really looked at what was next for a rapidly growing city. And I think wisely recognized that the city had a lot more to do in being a good partner on delivering high quality transit. And she recognized there was a ton of housing and employment coming to downtown, which it certainly did in Seattle with the, with the tech boom.

Tom Brennan (25m 37s):
And they work with their regional partners to set some pretty aggressive goals around achieving a 50% transit mo chair for downtown, which at the time in 2010 was about 25%. Many know the story that they actually achieved that. And before the pandemic had about a 50% transit mo chair for, for downtown access, which was a, a really tremendous decade of, of progress in Seattle. And certainly that’s credit to sound transit in King County. But I think the city had a really important role in that. And part of the exploration through that Seattle Transit master plan was really thinking carefully about what role the city played in in bus transit and when you, you know, when you actually start to break it down and think about kind of the holistic experience of the, the bus customer in terms of who delivers what.

Tom Brennan (26m 25s):
There are certainly things that are directly under the transit agencies control route design, service planning, you know, deploying the service, purchasing the fleet boarding policies, those types of things. But there’s actually probably more things that impact transit riders that are using buses that are under the municipalities control. So any sort of transit priority is likely going in a city or state DOT street, how we’re managing intersections, be it via Q jumps or channelization. The signals are all controlled usually by the local municipality or the DOT if we wanna implement other things like turn restrictions and the access to the stop.

Tom Brennan (27m 7s):
Also most of, most of that infrastructure is under city control. So thinking about, you know, great access experience at the stop, there’s so much,

Jeff Wood (27m 16s):
There’s

Tom Brennan (27m 17s):
So much that the cities can do. So this is really a great exploration with not only the city but their transit agency partners about what the city could be doing to be a much, much better partner. And they’ve really gone all in on implementing that. So, you know, following that plan, the city set up a transit and mobility division. So they actually shaped a division to work on transit and that group does capital planning, they do access to transit, they do policy. And they also really made this made the smart move of connecting both the supply and demand side. So they’ve got parking folks in that group, they’re linking parking management and curb management to both transit performance but also the TDM transportation demand management side.

Tom Brennan (27m 59s):
How do we get people encouraged to use transit? So all that, you know, I think all that roundabout story is to say this is really fertile grounds for transit agency city partnerships. And that’s been probably the most fun thing about doing this work in Salt Lake and Denver and San Francisco and in Seattle and with translating up in Vancouver is really helping connect those dots between municipal planners and engineers and folks at the, at the transit agency.

Jeff Wood (28m 27s):
Is it hard to convince city council members and board members of transit agencies that these are types of improvements that need to happen? Obviously you don’t need to convince us necessarily ’cause we know that it’s important, but you know, it can be a hard sell I imagine sometimes.

Tom Brennan (28m 42s):
Or

Jeff Wood (28m 42s):
Is it, I mean I think, and maybe it’s not, maybe it’s not a hard sell. I don’t know. I think

Tom Brennan (28m 45s):
Fundamentally it’s often not that challenging when you add up the benefits and, and show the costs, right? There’s very, very high level of cost effectiveness for effectiveness, some of this type of work. There are some real obstacles though I think amongst those are doing this work right often requires repurposing space from cars and general perfect traffic buses. I think that’s a hard part. Yeah. So that can, that can certainly be challenging and you know, really requires municipal partners who are bought in on the value of transit and understand the sort of criticality of, of transit for meeting our, our climate and and equity goals and are willing to, you know, adopt policies and actually put into practice some of those hard changes.

Tom Brennan (29m 31s):
I think the other, you know, the other place where this type of work can be really challenging, and this is a little bit ironic since a lot of these places are the neighborhoods that grew up around streetcar transit, but you know, in neighborhood business districts where you’ve got a lot of on street retail, we see a lot of really challenging conversations about bus speed and reliability and the trade offs with curb use. Not just curb parking, but curb, curb use and curb management these days. Particularly with heightened needs for pickup drop off for people and pickup and drop off for, for urban goods as well. Yeah,

Jeff Wood (30m 6s):
That’s a really important point too ’cause the kind of escalation of of goods movement is really huge and especially as you’re gonna see more and more vehicles on the street, it feels like during the, the pandemic because of the increase in online retail, it just seems like it’s exploded, especially in very urban neighborhoods. And the other interesting thing is like all these warehousing needs that are happening in cities like warehouses were kind of getting pushed out and now they’re a really important part of getting that last mile delivery stuff and, and day of delivery stuff happening. And so I imagine there’s a tension there between, you know, bus improvements and some of that delivery stuff that’s happening.

Tom Brennan (30m 41s):
Yeah, there very much is a tension and a lot of that exists, like I said, in core retail, retail districts. There could be opportunity there. And I think we’re just at kind of the nascent stages of seeing a number of our clients starting to explore opportunities for shared bus and freight lanes. you know, there’s a couple examples in place around the country today, but we’re seeing a lot more conversation and study around where could it make sense to have either long haul freight or even urban goods movement shared dedicated space with transit.

Jeff Wood (31m 15s):
How would that work? I’ve seen the, you know, shared bike and and bus, but how would that work with like goods movement if it’s a throughway? Is that how, how it works? Like they don’t, they don’t stop anywhere along the route. They just like they’re getting through to try to get to a warehouse somewhere or something along those lines. They’re not, you know, take up curb space or have a management issue. Yeah.

Tom Brennan (31m 32s):
You know, it’s not likely gonna work on an urban arterial where you’ve got a bus stop every two blocks because you know, trucks just probably don’t wanna be stopping and starting right, right behind a bus. But I think there are certain locations, you know, arterial streets that are bus pathways that are adjacent to or traveling through industrial districts sometimes have, you know, longer stop spacing and or shorter segments in very congested areas where maybe there’s a few bus stops but trucks would still be willing to share lanes to, to make it through those congested areas. I know the city of Seattle is piloting what they’re calling fab lanes, which are freight and bus.

Tom Brennan (32m 16s):
There’s a few fun acronyms, fab freight and bus fat and freight and trucks on a stretch of Westlake Avenue, which kind of runs between downtown Southlake Union and Fremont, which is another busy urban village neighborhood. And that’s a stretch of, of corridor that doesn’t have a lot of bus stopping. There’s not a lot of ingress egress activity in terms of, of roadway access, but it’s also an important truck route to one of their manufacturing and industrial centers and a very, you know, very high volume bus route as well. So they’ve kind of targeted that as a potential pilot area for this type of treatment. I know the MBTA is also piloting a summer street bus and truck lane project and I think with a lot of these kind of pilot projects, a lot of it is just about the monitoring to see how it works.

Tom Brennan (33m 4s):
So I expect that with a few of these types of projects popping up, maybe in a few years we’ll have some better data and better thinking from, from some of these cities and transit agencies about what the opportunity is. Yeah,

Jeff Wood (33m 14s):
We talk about, you know, the vehicle movements, but what about people movements? I mean the stops are a very important part of this too.

Tom Brennan (33m 20s):
So I think the, when we think about bus speed and reliability, what happens at the stop is really critical. So obviously, you know, the access to transit piece is, is something that we’re always thinking about in our transit planning, but that activity of people leaving the leaving the curb or leaving the the stop and actually boarding the bus can account for a lot of downtime and a lot of, you know, what we would refer to as delay in the bus services. So one of the interesting things we found from the TransLink rapid bus program, which you know, implemented a number of routes at the same time with quite a bit of transit priority, I think over 25 kilometers of transit priority. But also, you know, bus stop improvements was the fact that they went to all door boarding.

Tom Brennan (34m 4s):
So three door bus boarding across those routes was probably the single biggest contributor to travel time improvements. So just, you know, slight improvements in boarding time across the course of a route added up to quite a significant benefit.

Jeff Wood (34m 19s):
I feel like that’s something a lot of agencies should follow up on because I know they’re worried about fair collection but at the same time, like the speed difference is so huge it feels like.

Tom Brennan (34m 27s):
Yeah.

Jeff Wood (34m 28s):
What is your favorite intervention? Do you have a like a favorite, whether it’s a bus lane or maybe Q jumps or anything along those lines?

Tom Brennan (34m 36s):
My favorite is not the easiest or simplest, but I’m a huge fan of center running bus lanes just because they simply reduce the most conflict with vehicular traffic. So much happens on the right curb of a urban arterial between turning vehicles that are entering stores or driveways. you know, if a truck has to stop that’s where it’s gonna pull over and stop. There’s always right turn movements at intersections. So if there’s a place where you can fit in a center running lane for a long stretch or even for shorter, shorter stretches. And I think we’re seeing clients playing with, you know, shorter segments of center running priority. I’ll look to Seattle again as an example on Westlake Avenue and South Lake Union as that street approaches Mercer, which is a big

Jeff Wood (35m 23s):
Traffic sewer, big

Tom Brennan (35m 25s):
Traffic Exactly. That gets highly congested with vehicles moving towards I five and came up with a solution there that has a, about a three block center running lane that essentially ends in a queue jump so it kind of gets the bus back through traffic where it ends required a, you know, couple left turn restrictions along the corridor, but is a highly effective way to get bus priority in a place where a curbside lane just never would’ve worked. ’cause the right turn queue for the highway access was, was so significant. Yeah. And then you look at, you know, you look at places like the MBTA in Boston who have done fairly quick build projects with really significant center running transit lane.

Tom Brennan (36m 5s):
So these types of improvements don’t just have to be for the big hundreds of millions of dollar projects like you see on ven s or you know, what Denver’s doing with Kofax Boulevard. You can implement some of these projects quicker in in segments. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (36m 20s):
Shorter segments. Much, much cheaper. ’cause then you don’t have to rebuild a whole street. Right. That’s another thing that I’m always interested in is how much, like I know the, the story about we’re in Phoenix right now for impact and like the story of the light rail line is basically them having to rebuild the street, you know, basically sidewalk to sidewalk and they rebuild everything along it, including the street and that’s included in the capital cost. And so there’s a difference between what the cost for the transit improvement is versus like what’s the cost of actually doing this project because everybody’s gonna want a piece of it. Right? Right. So for the light rail, I think it ended up costing at the time, which seems like a bargain a hundred million a mile or something like that. Now every, everybody’s talking about, you know, a hundred fifty, two hundred, two hundred $50 million for a surface light rail, which is crazy to me.

Jeff Wood (37m 0s):
But, but you know, basically the reason why it was so much more expensive is ’cause they were doing that they were rebuilding from curb to curb. So how much of that is kind of calculated into these kind of massive bus rapid transit projects versus maybe doing a, you know, some of these smaller interventions where it’s like only a couple of blocks or things like that?

Tom Brennan (37m 17s):
Yeah, that’s a great question And and bus speed and reliability projects can go either way. You can have a, a single intersection project that rebuilds curbs implement some safety improvement improvements along the way and you know, could get quite expensive. Yeah. If you were to think about it on a per mile basis. But a lot of these projects can be done in more of a quick build fashion and I think it’s one of the things we’re seeing across the industry, not just for transit priority, but certainly for transit priority is that the quick build approach is one that brings a lot of benefits. One, it’s substantially cheaper. So the overall philosophy is that we’re gonna stick within the curb so we’re not touching curbs. We’re not touching drainage. Yeah. The things that really start to quickly escalate transit project costs and really, you know, working with posts and paint and signal operations.

Tom Brennan (38m 5s):
One city I would, I would point to that I think is doing some really exciting things. May not be a city that you, you’d expect it’s Culver City in that west LA area, you know, fairly, fairly small city. I think the population’s under 50,000. I think they also have over 50,000 employees. So a pretty, you know, employment rich area that’s sort of part of Silicon Beach. But Diana Chang, who’s their transportation director there, has really implemented a pretty exciting quick build program. They’re calling Move Culver City, which is really about using this quick build approach to pilot some bus and bike mobility lane type improvements. They implemented their first corridor, I think last year or the year before in downtown Culver City.

Tom Brennan (38m 46s):
And that’s, you know, quite an impressive good looking project with a lot of street paint and, and some very well designed bus facilities that actually have physical post protection for those lanes. I know Boston both the city and the MBTA have been big champions of, of quick build projects as well. And so I think the benefit is, you know, it it gives you an opportunity to test things out too without big capital projects.

Jeff Wood (39m 8s):
If I gave you a pot of money to do any project you wanted right now, what project would you choose? Boy,

Tom Brennan (39m 15s):
I think a project that I’m super excited about, and I don’t know if it needs your pot of money because there’ve

5 (39m 19s):
Been a lot of people,

Tom Brennan (39m 22s):
A lot of people working on it, is the coax corridor bus rapid transit project in, in Denver. I was lucky enough to work on the early concept design phase of that, that really kind of thought through the design of that project. For those who don’t know the coax corridor, it’s a major east west historic state highway corridor that traverses the whole of Denver. It’s been historically their highest ridership bus corridor serve some very diverse communities along the six or seven miles that it runs through and was not one of the corridors that was funded through the Fast Tracks initiative that’s built out a lot of the light rail across the region for the last couple decades.

Tom Brennan (40m 2s):
So really with some, some leadership from the city, they decided to take on looking at transit improvements in that corridor. We came in, I think back in 2018 or so and, and worked with their transit leader at the time it was Ryan Billings to figure out what the right solution for transit was in that corridor and were able to bring the community along on a design that includes a bus center running bus lane for the full extent of that project through Denver was some challenging conversations, certainly, but I think the incredible ridership in that corridor and the, the benefit to transit was a, a key part of that conversation. But so was, you know, really thinking through some of the other benefits of the project and opportunity to rebuild portions of that street in particular, coax has historically been one of the highest collision corridors in the city, if not the state.

Tom Brennan (40m 52s):
And we were really able to talk to people about the benefits center bus lanes bring to pedestrian and bicycle safety. If you think about a traditional five lane corridor where you’ve got the center turn lane with unprotected left turns, those are some of the most dangerous movements that vehicles make. So the center transit lane means that all the turn movements are now at protected signaled intersections. So really tremendous, tremendous safety benefits. And we’re also able to work, there’s three business improvement districts along that corridor, work with them to understand some of the opportunities that came with, you know, moving some of the transit passengers off the curb so there’s more space for public realm improvements, streetside cafes in a quarter that has pretty, you know, pretty narrow sidewalks.

Tom Brennan (41m 36s):
Yeah. So, so kind of pulling the full picture together with the multitude of stakeholders and not just focusing on the tremendous transit benefit, but some of the, you know, transformational opportunities for those communities was really exciting. So that project is progressing and I’m excited to see it get

Jeff Wood (41m 52s):
Built. Yeah. I mean it’s gonna be pretty cool. A number of years ago I lived in Boulder for a summer and came down to go to the Bluebird Theater Oh yeah. To go to some shows and it was really fun. But also that street is huge and scary for sure. If you park across the street and try to get across, it’s not, not a lot of fun. Hopefully

Tom Brennan (42m 7s):
It’ll be a little less scary in the future.

Jeff Wood (42m 9s):
Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping, that’s what I’m hoping. Well, what’s next for you all in terms of some of these projects that you’re working on?

Tom Brennan (42m 16s):
I think we’re excited to keep spreading the bus be and reliability love across the country. I think there are, and I’ve talked about a number of agencies that are doing some really great work in this space, but I think there’s a lot of agencies and cities that haven’t really started to tackle this in, in earnest. So our hope is that we can do more of this work across the country not, and not just in the bigger cities. I think there’s plenty of, you know, smaller and and medium sized cities that are truly reliant on their bus based programs where there’s just great opportunity for more bus speed and reliability work.

Jeff Wood (42m 49s):
Yeah. Well, where can folks find you if you wish to be found?

Tom Brennan (42m 52s):
I am again at Nelson Nygard, so go to the Nelson Nygard website, look for Tom Brennan and shoot me an email or give me a call. We’d love to chat with anybody about this fun topic. Awesome.

Jeff Wood (43m 3s):
Well Tom, thanks for joining us. Really appreciate your time. Yeah,

Tom Brennan (43m 6s):
It’s a pleasure.