Ultimately I think if some street directions are switched a solution can be reached (and as I understand it, Berkeley has switched the direction of one way streets in the past).

Mike – Your second point threw me off a bit. I’ve heard dozens of arguments about the BRT project, but never have I heard anyone complain that it would create campus access problems. In fact, the University whole-heartedly supports BRT, partially because there’s a huge parking problem on campus and UC Berkeley rightfully believes BRT would mitigate some parking issues.

As a former UCB student who lives on the BRT route, I know that BRT would have made my life a whole lot easier. Also, living on Telegraph, every day I see students parking in North Oakland (where there are no parking time limits) and hopping on the 1/1R. While I don’t think this is a perfect arrangement, these students would certainly benefit from BRT. And with more reliable service, maybe they wouldn’t have to drive at all and could just ride BRT from wherever they live.

Mike, while it’s true that BART moves well for north-south trips, it is also inadequate for a great many local trips. The stations are simply too far apart. BART only works for local trips if you happen to be traveling between neighborhoods lucky enough to get a station. BRT and BART may have the same geographic orientation, but they serve two different purposes.

The problem with BRT on a crosstown (i.e. East-West) corridor is that those routes are in general very lightly used in the East Bay. The major trunk routes with highest ridership are the major north-south routes, i.e. the 1, 51, and 72. These also happen to be the corridors with the widest boulevards that more easily accommodate a dedicated transitway. In the long-term, it would be nice to create a BRT network with both types of routes, as indicated in the map. But it makes more sense to invest first in a corridor with 20,000 daily riders than one with 2,000 daily riders. A good first step on the crosstown routes is to increase service frequency to make these buses a more viable method of accessing BART stations.

2. The allignment for BRT close to the UC campus is a problem. While there is bad nimby-ism in Berkeley, there is also valid concern about access to campus.

3. I wonder if a better BRT model would be less North-South and more East-West. BART moves N-S very well, so if there were spokes out from BART it could enable people to get to and from BART more easily.

I realize there is a problem of paying two fares for BART and BRT, but perhaps some sort of East Bay Pass could be worked out (like the Muni pass letting you ride BART free in SF, maybe there could be an Oakland-Berkeley-San Leandro pass).

Thanks also for your and others’ work in promoting the importance of the project and debunking the myths. I’ve been hoping to help participate in that effort, as well; getting to North Berkeley on a weekday evening isn’t particularly easy, but maybe sometime soon.

There is a schism of sorts in the pro-transit community, in part brought about by worthy light rail projects being downgraded to BRT to save money — and a backlash of sorts, because there is also a subset of people who extol BRT so unconditionally as to say that building BRT is in every sense equivalent to building rail, only with buses. Which it isn’t, of course, but dismissing BRT just because it isn’t rail seems silly to me. In some places it really makes sense.

Quite frankly, I can understand the anti-BRT sentiment, as it applies to some cities across the country that are just beginning to build a real transit network. These cities deserve to have a dedicated rail network at its foundation that buses can feed into, both to encourage higher transit usage and to provide natural corridors for more intense land use. That’s how you begin the process of creating a more livable, transit-oriented city.

Here in the Bay Area though, for all of BART’s faults, we are blessed to already have a rapid system that unites a great deal of the region (even if we are still far from maximizing the land use potential of that system) — and with dozens of other operators besides. At this point, we’re not starting from scratch, but expanding and improving. If one goal is to increase ridership, another goal just as important is to improve service quality for existing riders. BRT works to fill in exactly this sort of niche.

Though I wrote about the anti-BRT initiative, I’m still very hopeful about the current BRT project and future projects. We have a good crew of advocates working to debunk the myths put forward by the opposition and we’re going to embark on further outreach (especially to bus riders).

I think it’s interesting that there is a small group of hardcore transit supporters who think BRT is worthless and that we should only be fighting for rail. The reality is that the neighborhood groups would be fighting us even more if we were proposing a rail line because it would use more traffic lanes and parking space. Also, rail is significantly more expensive. Though I support rail in some cases, I agree with Eric that BRT is especially suited for parts of the East Bay.

On the downtown issue – this has to be one of the most frustrating parts of being bus dependent. It is actually quicker for me to walk from 14th and Webster, where I work, to the Amtrak station (sometimes I take the train to Sacramento) because no bus lines take me directly there. We really need a better downtown bus loop.

Where did that benevolent pro-transit dictator run off to? ;)

I’m of two minds about places like Lakeshore. Adams Point and Eastlake are some of the densest East Bay neighborhoods, probably on par with parts of the Inner Sunset/Richmond, so it’s not like the potential riders aren’t there. And yet, ridership in these dense neighborhoods is just a fraction of what it could be. That has to be due, at least in part, to meandering, less frequent routes operating in this area. Just looking at the numbers, I would agree that these places may not be worthy of BRT-type investment, but I can’t help but feel that we are falling short of tapping a rich resource in these inner ring neighborhoods that fall just short of being comfortably transit-oriented.

There’s something comforting in knowing that you’re never too far from a frequent and reasonably quick transit line, even if it doesn’t have dedicated lanes. I think this sense of security could well make or break it for many people in terms of becoming devoted riders. AC Transit carries about 1/3 of Muni’s load in a much larger geographic region, so the comparison can’t be a direct one — but while a great deal of San Francisco is a short walk from a major, frequent route, this is much less true of the East Bay right now. That’s something I’d really like to fix, at least for Oakland and the main Berkeley grid. I suppose that’s really why I included some of these less important corridors. By that line of reasoning, I probably ought to have also included 14th Ave, 23rd Ave, High St., etc., maybe even Alcatraz — but then the “is it worth the investment” question creeps in again.