Ashland Avenue BRT

The city of Chicago has been pretty quiet on the subject of its Ashland bus rapid transit plan lately, but recently there have been encouraging signs that even some skeptics are warming to the concept.

There was some good news last week for two of the Chicago Transit Authority's big upcoming projects. On Wednesday the Obama administration recommended the CTA’s Red & Purple Modernization project for fiscal year 2015 funding, and included the Ashland bus rapid transit corridor on a lists of transit projects for possible future funding. However, approval by Congress is no sure thing.

A recent Sun-Times piece gave airtime to old-school Chicago Department of Transportation traffic engineer Tom Kaeser, gloomily predicting that the CTA’s Ashland bus rapid transit plan will cause carmageddon. Last week, in the wake of that article, University of Chicago public policy grad student Daniel Hertz cleverly debunked some of the arguments against creating fast, reliable Ashland bus service on his blog City Notes.

Appearing on Chicago Tonight last month, 12th Ward Alderman George Cardenas made a number of ill-informed statements about the plan to create fast, reliable transit on Ashland Avenue. Most egregiously, he painted BRT as an "expressway" where "no one’s going to stop," when in fact the project is going to help more people access Ashland Avenue.

One of the most controversial aspects of the CTA’s plan to create bus rapid transit on Ashland Avenue is the prohibition of most left turns from Ashland. Since the buses will operate in dedicated lanes next to the median, any left turns by vehicles from the mixed-traffic lanes will require that the buses get a red light while the turning vehicles get a green arrow. Watering down the BRT route with too many left turns would significantly slow down the buses.

Last Sunday, on a trip to New York, I rode the M15 Select Bus Service route on First Avenue in Manhattan. SBS incorporates components of bus rapid transit but it doesn't rise to the level of real BRT, according to standards laid out by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. Riding the M15 from 14th Street to 67th Street, I could tell that SBS is a significant improvement over typical bus service, but I also got a sense of its limitations. This revealed a lot about Chicago's BRT plans, and the reasoning behind the proposed design for BRT on Ashland Avenue. Simply put, Ashland BRT will avoid the shortcomings of SBS.

Opponents of the CTA’s plan to build fast, reliable bus rapid transit on Ashland Avenue have argued that, despite the success of BRT in numerous international and U.S. cities, Ashland is a unique street where converting car lanes to dedicated bus lanes won’t work. Streetsblog readers also have asked for examples of systems that share the elements of the CTA’s plan: a four-lane street converted to two travel lanes plus center-running bus lanes, with most left turns prohibited, on-street parking, and some local, curbside bus service retained.

Today’s Sun-Times article on the city’s plans to implement fast, efficient bus rapid transit on Ashland Avenue and in the Loop didn’t provide much new information on the projects, and it included a few errors. However, it did provide a bit of a window on the mayor’s thoughts on the subject.