Bus Rapid Transit

[This article also ran in Checkerboard City, John Greenfield's column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets in print on Wednesday evenings.]

The toughest part of the city’s effort to create bus rapid transit in the downtown East-West Transit and the Western/Ashland BRT corridors will be convincing Chicagoans that it’s a good idea to remove travel lanes on major streets to make room for dedicated bus lanes. Help arrived today in the form of a $1.2 million Rockefeller Foundation grant that will be used to build local understanding and support for BRT in Chicago, as well as Boston, Nashville and Pittsburgh.

There’s a new global benchmark for rating bus rapid transit projects. Today the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy released the BRT Standard 2013, which lays out the requirements for bus routes to qualify as BRT and scores 50 systems in 35 cities around the world as basic, bronze, silver, or gold based on various criteria. The idea, which ITDP has been refining since a beta release in 2011, is to provide a concrete definition of what BRT is, and a reference for politicians, planners, and advocates who are interested in creating new BRT routes, as well as to rate the quality of existing systems.

“We knew how important it was for federal policy makers to see innovation and new ideas bubbling up from important cities around the country,” said Nick Turner, managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation at a bus rapid transit roundtable last Friday. The foundation has provided roughly $2.8 million in grants to Chicago's BRT program for research, technical support, land-use planning, project management, community engagement, branding and communications. “That’s why we started to get interested in the work here in Chicago.” The seminar, Bus Rapid Transit on a Roll in Chicago, took place at the Loop offices of the Metropolitan Planning Council, which promotes sustainable development and transportation in the region.

In a recent CBS Chicago TV editorial, veteran news personality Walter Jacobson panicked that the city’s proposal for the Central Loop BRT corridor would “create a gridlock of the world,” but he’s wildly unclear on the concept. The plan would create dedicated bus lanes with island boarding platforms on Washington and Madison; the proposed Washington configuration includes a protected bike lane between the platform and the curb. However, on the CBS website this bus rapid transit project is erroneously branded the “Washington Street Bike Plan.”

Earlier this winter the Active Transportation Alliance asked members to complete a questionnaire about what features they’d like to see at future bus rapid transit stations for proposed BRT corridors on Western and Ashland, and in the Loop. More than 900 people responded to the survey, which ended January 31. The results show that “people are really interested in real-time arrival screens, they’re interested in improving protection from the elements, from wind, as well as heat lamps when it’s cold,” said Active Trans’ Lee Crandell in a WBEZ interview. Crandell said that about 60 percent of respondents put shelter from the weather on the top of their wish list.

Andersonville has long been ahead of the curve when it comes to sustainable transportation and public space initiatives. The neighborhood’s main drag on Clark Street is one of Chicago’s most vibrant pedestrian retail districts, and its chamber of commerce and aldermen have been strong supporters of bike facilities. The business strip recently became home to one of the city’s first People Spots, which replaced parking spaces with a miniature park, as well as two on-street bike racks.

This morning at Freedman Seating, a Humboldt Park-based company that will be making seats for hundreds of new CTA buses, Mayor Rahm Emanuel argued that better public transportation can give a shot in the arm to the local economy. The 120-year-old company will be fabricating some 11,100 seats for the transit agency’s $148 million contract to buy at least 300 new vehicles from the Nova Bus company. The CTA says the bus purchase will create up to 100 new local jobs.

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