Quote:
Originally Posted by hat
Assuming that buses will somehow go faster simply because some of their stops along the route have their own ROW seems folly. All of the route from 39th to the river will have no ROW. And most of the route from I205 to the 39th will not include stops with their own ROW. Calling this "Bus Rapid Transit" is putting lipstick on a cow.
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You make some good points, but the route from I-205 to about 42nd has space for additional lanes, and when I referred to BRT I was talking about limited stop buses (only at major transfer points, which reduces the stops by a lot) and off board ticketing.
I ride the 9 a bit (2-4 times per week) and the biggest hassle isn't the time the bus is moving, but the time that it's not. Where we're just waiting for a wheelchair ramp to deploy, or that someone is digging in their pockets for their money to pay the fare, or (at SE Powell and Milwaukie) when the bus gets stuck waiting behind a 19 that needs to let people off/on before the 9 can get to the stop.
Dedicated lanes would be nice, but Powell never seems to be quite that backed up until you get out past Foster. Inside Foster it moves fairly well because in large part there are so few lights. I drive on Powell a few times a week, and the only time traffic becomes an issue for me usually is from ~72nd to I-205. (I rarely take it east of 205, so I can't really speak to that.)
Maybe I'm completely wrong, but from living along the corridor (I've lived near SE Milwaukie & Powell as well as SE 39th and Powell) I'm not convinced that Powell needs LRT service so much as more and better bus service.
Maybe as mentioned we should just skip calling it BRT and just call it BBT for better bus transit.
The only other infrequent-stop-but-frequent-service route I can think of that could be upgraded in a similar matter would be the 6 on MLK. Other than near the Rose Quarter/Lloyd Center and I-5 it doesn't get too backed up, but the existing bus is really, really slow because it stops all the damned time.
Maybe TriMet just cares about time between stops, but to increase average speeds boarding and payment times should be included as well. Reducing those should help the route.