Category Archives: Bus Rapid Transit

Berkeley BRT Ballot Initiative City Council Update

Given the fact that the Berkeley City Council decided not to litigate against the anti-BRT voter initiative — choosing instead to “honor the initiative process” — it was clear that the initiative would indeed be added to the November ballot. That said, I thought I should probably add this update to clarify any potential confusion [...]

City of Berkeley v. Voters of Berkeley Averted

The last time we picked up the seemingly endless saga concerning the mere 1 to 1.5 miles of bus-only lanes proposed for the Berkeley leg of AC Transit’s BRT project along Telegraph Avenue, the Berkeley Daily Planet had propagated an outright lie, alleging that the San Leandro City Council had already “opted out” of its [...]

Not Everyone in the East Bay Hates BRT

Not everyone in the East Bay hates BRT. Here is an article from the Daily Review, forwarded by Hank Resnik of the Berkeley group Friends of BRT. The Berkeley Daily Planet continues to cement its reputation as one of the Bay Area’s most definitive sources for fact-free journalism, by “reporting” that the San Leandro City [...]

Rapid Bus Minus

Proposed BRT at Shattuck Avenue & Bancroft in Berkeley.
Courtesy FMG Architects.

And so it continues: the ever-committed opponents of Bus Rapid Transit in supposedly progressive Berkeley have hatched a plan to stop BRT in the East Bay — “Rapid Bus Plus,” a brainchild of the group Berkeleyans for Better Transportation Options (BBTOP). Under “Rapid Bus Plus,” [...]

East Bay BRT Expansion

This post will lay out a guide for future bus rapid transit expansion in the East Bay; it is the companion to a San Francisco BRT post from a couple months ago. The map at right (click through for a full-sized map, hosted on Flickr) is a visual depiction of what a future rapid bus [...]

Why We Still Need Better Education About BRT

It seems that when gauging reader interest about blog posts, the number of times a post is viewed is not actually that useful a statistic, because many of those views will be people who click through quickly from a search engine. A more useful metric of reader interest, I believe, is the number of comments [...]

East Bay BRT Hits Snag at Lake Merritt

Courtesy Flickr member in2jazz.

The Berkeley Daily Planet mentioned last week a problem point in the planning of the proposed East Bay bus rapid transit route, which would run from Berkeley to San Leandro via Telegraph Avenue, downtown Oakland, and East 14th Street. The issue concerns the new street replacing the expressway around Lake Merritt, which [...]

SF Transit Dream: Bus Rapid Transit Edition

About a month ago, I posted two dream subway maps for San Francisco and the East Bay. The goal of that exercise was to correct some of the inadequacies of the current BART and Muni Metro systems, as well as to identify additional corridors that are candidates for rail expansion. As much fun as it [...]

BRT in Action

BRT in action. Naysayers who claim that building dedicated BRT lanes will only increase traffic without removing cars off the road need look no further than Bogotá, Colombia, to see the difference that cost-effective but well-planned transit investments can make. TransMilenio, Bogotá’s BRT system, on average moves over twice as fast as Muni and carries [...]

Van Ness BRT: Service Plans

Last week the SFCTA held two scoping meetings to get public input in drafting the EIS/EIR for the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project. This is Part 3 of a three-post series that combines the findings from the earlier feasibility study, the discussion from the meeting, and some of my own comments on the [...]