| JTA's BRT plan for Downtown |
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| Monday, 03 December 2007 | |
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For those that did not take advantage of JTA's open house presentations a few months back, here is what they have proposed for Downtown Jacksonville's streets.
The Downtown corridor will become the central focal point of JTA's planned billion dollar bus rapid transit system.
Because dedicated busways run parallel to rail lines at the costly expense of taxpayers and nearby land & business owners, Metro Jacksonville has taken the position of supporting a rail alternative. Contrary to popular belief, this argument isn't about rail vs. BRT, it's about enhancing the current RTS proposal, while saving money, the downtown environment, and neighborhoods by replacing BRT corridors with rail trunk lines that neighborhood buses would feed riders into.
This image illustrates how all existing bus routes will be potentially consolidated to Adams Street.
Unfortunately, planners decided not to show how this plan interacts with the Skyway.
This was done for good reason. This Metro Jacksonville graphic shows how this system competes with the Skyway for riders, instead of complementing it.
Opens A & C are unrealistic because they would leave transit riders at the mercy of a working drawbridge, which would negatively impact its reliability of reaching destinations on time. Opens B & D compete with the Skyway, rendering the $184 million dollar system useless. In Miami, the regional transit system was designed to feed riders into their Metromover, as opposed to competing with it.
Again, no conceptual alternative should be decided without even acknowledging the Skyway exists. We've already made an expensive investment in downtown mobility. The least we could do is plan to use it.
There's no law that says buses must travel on dedicated lanes. Why can't buses travel with mixed traffic on State & Union? Also, although State and Union don't go through the heart of downtown, transit riders can transfer at the existing FCCJ/Rosa Parks Station to the Skyway and trolley network to reach the urban core. Doing such would cut down the transit time for riders traveling to destinations outside of the downtown core, as well as feed additional riders into existing transit services.
For some reason, RTS planners believe that removing most of the parallel parking on Adams, Bay or Forsyth is only a minor inconvenience in their efforts to ram this system down our throats. Also, it appears that they believe the atmosphere will be vastly improved by jamming the major streets of downtown with heavy bus traffic. For some reason, other urban cores blessed with BRT don't agree. Minneapolis, MN See what residents have to say: Choose your poison: Bus exhaust, or singing? Sam Grabarski wants cars on Nicollet Mall Everyone's favorite place to eat and inhale exhaust fumes
Berkeley, CA New buses leave Berkeley vendors in dust
Is Jacksonville ready to make the same mistake? Houston, TX Houston Dumps BRT for light rail: Connecting the tracks Maybe we should looking at what's going on in Houston right now?
While it may take a few decades to build the entire 29 mile system, JTA plans to experiment with downtown's streets next year. Another way to participate is by spreading the word to your neighbors and send your comments to the city council at: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it |
December 3, 2007, 12:24 pm
Re: JTA's BRT plan for Downtown
Are all the people involved in this bad, bad idea aware that they are implementing their pedestrian unfriendly concept on 3 of the most pedestrian friendly streets downtown? I'm sure the residents of 11E, The Carling, W.A. Knight, Berkman 1 & 2, and the other planned residential conversions are going to love this. There seems to be some life on Bay Street at night with the bars located there and of course Nickie G's Pizza. I'm sure the people hanging out in front of Mark's are going to love the buses spewing fumes as they speed by. The people who park there at night are going to have to find a new place to park, which should hurt business. The JTA is so out of touch with the real needs of the community, and now they plan to run their bad experiment downtown. I guess it's easier to anger just a few residents. I'm convinced they don't care about what happens downtown except fron 9-5 on weekdays.
December 3, 2007, 12:39 pm
Re: JTA's BRT plan for Downtown
There are some on the citizen's committee that do not care. At one meeting, during a heated debate, one lady told me they were there to get transit right first, not there to worry about sidewalk cafes and lofts in downtown. The bad thing is the best used mass transit systems are designed to enhance the urban environments they serve, as well as set up to efficiently move riders. In our case, its more about moving buses from point A to B and forcing areas unfortunately located along the routes to adapt to the negatives associated with the system.
December 3, 2007, 4:46 pm
Re: JTA's BRT plan for Downtown
[Sigh]. Meanwhile, Central Florida has just passed a major milestone in their quest for commuter rail.
http://www.cfrail.com/newsevents.asp?type=news&id=44#Article
December 4, 2007, 8:38 am
Re: JTA's BRT plan for Downtown
Was this JTA plan written by Tolkien or John Grisham....I mean come on, I don't even feel like I am living in reality when I read this story. Seriously, using tax money to write fictional transportation plans! Is Jacksonville the twilight zone?
Seriously, who spends billions of dollars on buses? How "small townish" and "unprogressive" can you be to spend billions of dollars on buses? Billions of dollars on buses! If this new and expanded system is anything like the current one, there will be no one using it. Honestly, I rarely see buses in Jacksonville and they are usually driving around empty. I lived in a progressive college town of 30000 that had a more visible and more widely used bus system. 30000 people!
This plan brings me hope of a future Jax where I can see 2 empty buses per month driving around as opposed to the 1 empty bus I see now!
December 4, 2007, 8:50 am
Re: JTA's BRT plan for Downtown
Seriously, who spends billions of dollars on buses? How "small townish" and "unprogressive" can you be to spend billions of dollars on buses? Billions of dollars on buses! If this new and expanded system is anything like the current one, there will be no one using it. Honestly, I rarely see buses in Jacksonville and they are usually driving around empty. I lived in a progressive college town of 30000 that had a more visible and more widely used bus system. 30000 people!
This plan brings me hope of a future Jax where I can see 2 empty buses per month driving around as opposed to the 1 empty bus I see now!
Well with BRT the buses will be going so fast, you won't be able to see that there is no one on the bus, plus it will be 20 feet in the air. Now that's thinking for you. Whoever thought up of this idea must be related to Hindenburg.
December 4, 2007, 9:26 am
Re: JTA's BRT plan for Downtown
BRT in general, is not a bad thing. The problem comes when you move into the arena of building dedicated busways (or expressways for buses) for BRT. Securing right-of-way and constructing busway infrastructure costs just as much as light rail and a lot more than the hydrid commuter rail systems coming online today. The gulf between the two really grows when you have the opportunity to use rail ROW already owned by the city (S-Line) and rail that may have the excess capacity due to deals in other communities (CSX "A" Line).
Many believe that what we've been pushing is for an "either or solution" or "BRT vs. Rail" debate. In reality, both should complement each other. JTA's proposed BRT corridors serve as "trunk lines" for the city's bus system. No one is saying start over from scratch, we're just pushing for a change in the "trunk line" technology (from bus to rail) to take advantage of existing rail ROW that the BRT corridors happen to parallel. Use the affordable rail technologies out there to serve as the trunk line to the city's mass transportation network and reconfigure the existing bus system to feed riders into the rail trunk line to access other parts of town.
In the end, you get a superior system with a more attractive mode of transit, for a cheaper price that doesn't require taking people's homes and businesses in the process.
December 4, 2007, 1:02 pm
Dreaming with OUR money...
I just keep following the lines on the maps, and they don't make much sense. Before we convert the downtown into a giant bus freeway, we need to consider the needs of DOWNTOWN, and hold JTA's feet in the fire on the Skyway. I'm starting to see a pattern here, build it, let it rot for 30 years, and nobody will remember you said, "IT WILL TAKE THE BUSES OFF THE SURFACE STREETS!" Sorry JTA but I remember.
I placed a "finished Skyway" over the BRT or "other" bus routes and came up with something like this:
While I show some buses still running on Adams Street, Union, State, Broadway etc... they are limited to those needing to access Transportation Center at Union Terminal, and to those which run cross town such as Beaches - Westside, or Airport - Southside. EVERYTHING else would terminate at the mini-centers built around the Skyway.
Toss in streetcars, shown in a fine green line, and real Trolley Buses (not shown but following a revised "trolley" shuttle route) and we would balance the whole picture with clean modern transit. The few places where the Skyway and bus routes overlap, are river crossings where no one gets on or off anyway.
Leave the BRT on Arlington Expressway, but use the service roads. Other BRT could go down HOV lanes with minimal changes to current construction needs.
BRT as a concept is fuzzy, it is a cafe of "Dedicated Busways or lanes", "Signal priority", "Enhanced Stations", "Enhanced Vehicles", "Slightly faster schedules", "Real time information", etc... Take your pick. Cities with just one or two of these items are calling it BRT, so are cities that think they must build flying busways. Looking at the BRT shopping list, one has to wonder, if we need purpose-built dedicated busways, or if the street-lanes we already have would work? Just how much good will come from double building along our railroads? They claim we will convert it to LRT when the demand reaches a certain point, but what does that mean? Will we just abandon the busway and put a train below? Will we build a whole new railroad, above the current ones? Seems like a terrible waste of money to me.
Looking at the rest of the list, what good will come of "Signal Priority?" While the FTA is pushing this idea, experience in other cities says it will destroy the timed light system and create larger traffic jams then those we already have.
Enhanced stations? Overkill again and again, with JTA saying they are going to build TOD type stations. No one in Jacksonville seems to know the REAL TOD'S are private developers that place large projects over the path of rapid transit. Transit comes first, TOD'S follow. There is no problem with better stations or bus stops, but to create a Wal-Mart size bus stop and claim we have BRT-TODS is a fantasy.
Millions of Passenger-Miles, 1990-2000
Growth BUS = 1.2%, REGIONAL RAIL = 32.8%, RAPID RAIL = 20.6%, LIGHT RAIL = 137.5%
Enhanced vehicles, as Lakelander said, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. Ditto for buses. While the FTA and BRT advocate claim "It's just like rail only cheaper," what they ignore is the ridership numbers are nearly twice as high for rail. Public transit ridership has nose-dived in the last 20 years, then perked up just a hair lately. The facts show that the 100-150% gains in Rail ridership, mostly LRT, have carried bus and commuter rail upward. Each of the last two posting modest gains around 5-10%. I love new buses, to me they are beautiful machines, but I wouldn't spend a billion dollars on them. So what will enhanced vehicles do for Jacksonville, but give us nice, clean new buses?
Faster schedules? When JTA or another transit agency talks about faster schedules, they are talking about seconds or minutes at best. Most BRT runs about twice the speed of regular transit buses, so give them a 25 MPH average and we are being kind. Is it really worth a billion dollars to enhance a busway so someone can arrive downtown at 8:45 instead of 8:50?
Real Time information? This is a computer linked GPS system on buses that, like our Skyway, tells you when the next bus is coming, or what delays to expect. They have been in use around the world for some time. Certainly they are a nice idea, but in remote areas, or unmanned stations, they are expensive toys and targets for vandals. I think we need to see them here, NOW, let's see how they work on the Arlington Expressway, Blanding and Lem Turner areas before we go wholesale into placing them all over our system.
Ocklawaha
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