Public Transit Symposium

[betts]

I think there are some reasonable arguments for BRT, but one interesting fact is that BRT is frequently as expensive as a streetcar, when you compare purchase, operation and maintenance costs. If Hutch sees this, I think he has the data. I remember seeing cost comparisons as part of the Hub study and I was shocked to see how similar the costs are.

[Urban Pioneer]

The bird has already flown on this one, but has anyone discussed Bus Rapid Transit in OKC. The principal is that you have dedicated lanes, dedicated stoplights, a routine schedule (i.e. bus runs every 15 minutes), elevated ADA compliant loading/unloading zones at each stop etc. Basically it is everything that a streetcar is, without the railroad tracks. Because of this it is much much cheaper, and can thus have a longer route map than a traditional streetcar. Also it has the effect of creating all the lanes needed to eventually upgrade to a true streetcar at some future point.

Bus rapid transit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pleae forgive me if this has already been discussed to death. I am new-ish to town, and new-ish to these forums.

Yes it has. It very well may be a very legitimate solution to providing express transit service to NW Expressway via a Classen connection to downtown. There were several of us that advocated that it be considered in the MAPS 3 program. It was but was ultimately ruled out by the council for really three reasons.

One, was that Classen/NW Expressway did not affect all Wards. So there was a thought that unless you put transit in all Wards, downtown was the only "politically neutral" zone in which you could have the public's support for major investment. That is also a major reason historically MAPS monies have gravitated to downtown. "Because downtown belongs to everyone."

Two, was that annual and Operations Costs were estimated more than the streetcar and the council was assuming taking the money out of the annual budget. So the smaller pill was easier to swallow long term.

Three, there were other projects that they wanted to do. IE Park, Convention Center, Wellness Centers. So the politically available MAPS 3 dollar could cover start up streetcar and buying the Santa-Fe Hub location, but not much else.

What has changed is people's interest on transit is expanding and you have Councilman Shadid vocally fighting for more transit. I do think that the next MAPS initiative, should there be one, will have a significant transit element in it if this is handled right and we honor the MAPS 3 commitment. I also think that we can come up with a permanent funding solution that can include O&M for BRT as well as expanded rail.

Hope this helps.

[DoctorTaco]

Hope this helps.

It did. Thanks!

[BoulderSooner]

The bird has already flown on this one, but has anyone discussed Bus Rapid Transit in OKC. The principal is that you have dedicated lanes, dedicated stoplights, a routine schedule (i.e. bus runs every 15 minutes), elevated ADA compliant loading/unloading zones at each stop etc. Basically it is everything that a streetcar is, without the railroad tracks. Because of this it is much much cheaper, and can thus have a longer route map than a traditional streetcar. Also it has the effect of creating all the lanes needed to eventually upgrade to a true streetcar at some future point.

Bus rapid transit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pleae forgive me if this has already been discussed to death. I am new-ish to town, and new-ish to these forums.

two things you are confusing light rail (dedicated lane) with street car (runs in lanes of traffic with cars)

BRT with dedicated lanes costs more than street car

[warreng88]

I would think the most effective and easy BRT would be airport to the Santa Fe train station. Charge a certain amount per rider ($3-$5), have a stop right outside of the baggage claim area and have a DT map available to all coming on the bus. Have two running from 6am to 10pm and less on weekends. The taxis will still be used for people needing to go somewhere other than downtown or for people who feel like not riding the bus. Hell, I don't think you would even need one of the accordion buses like in the pictures of the wikipedia page, you could use a normal city bus until the demand gets higher.

[BoulderSooner]

I would think the most effective and easy BRT would be airport to the Santa Fe train station. Charge a certain amount per rider ($3-$5), have a stop right outside of the baggage claim area and have a DT map available to all coming on the bus. Have two running from 6am to 10pm and less on weekends. The taxis will still be used for people needing to go somewhere other than downtown or for people who feel like not riding the bus. Hell, I don't think you would even need one of the accordion buses like in the pictures of the wikipedia page, you could use a normal city bus until the demand gets higher.

true BRT from the airport to the santa fe station would cost somewhere between 150-250 million dollars

[Just the facts]

I would think the most effective and easy BRT would be airport to the Santa Fe train station. Charge a certain amount per rider ($3-$5), have a stop right outside of the baggage claim area and have a DT map available to all coming on the bus. Have two running from 6am to 10pm and less on weekends. The taxis will still be used for people needing to go somewhere other than downtown or for people who feel like not riding the bus. Hell, I don't think you would even need one of the accordion buses like in the pictures of the wikipedia page, you could use a normal city bus until the demand gets higher.

I think you are thinking of an express bus. An express bus in not BRT. I think BRT to the airport would cost more than $250 million. You are talking a 2 lane dedicated freeway running 10 miles with most of it being elevated. BRT cost can run as high $77 million per mile.

[warreng88]

true BRT from the airport to the santa fe station would cost somewhere between 150-250 million dollars

I guess then don't make it true? Just have a dedicated bus route to and from the airport from SF.

For the sake of furthering my knowledge, what would make the cost of BRT so high? Are we talking about rails like the streetcar but able to take on higher speeds? I really know very little about this so don't think I am asking sarcastically.

[BoulderSooner]

I guess then don't make it true? Just have a dedicated bus route to and from the airport from SF.

For the sake of furthering my knowledge, what would make the cost of BRT so high? Are we talking about rails like the streetcar but able to take on higher speeds? I really know very little about this so don't think I am asking sarcastically.

BRT is a dedicated divided lane (walled off) with limited traffic lights along the entire route ..

[warreng88]

BRT is a dedicated divided lane (walled off) with limited traffic lights along the entire route ..

Got it. thanks for the clarification.

[Rover]

How many passengers are projected to go from airport to downtown per day? Doubt we have anywhere NEAR the volume to justify, nor will have in the forseable future.

[Just the facts]

For Educational Purposes:

[Just the facts]

How many passengers are projected to go from airport to downtown per day? Doubt we have anywhere NEAR the volume to justify, nor will have in the forseable future.

You're right. There isn't near the demand. That is why any mass transit to the airport would have to be part of a regional rail network where people from all corners of the metro could ride a train to a downtown station and then transfer to an airport train. It would even be possible to do baggage check-in in Norman, Edmond, downtown OKC, and at Tinker so people wouldn't have to carry their luggage.

[soonerguru]

But it is one thing to say we don't want to ignore the bus system. It is another thing to design a system that has no intention of improving or complimenting the bus system. The route is really a perfect example of how early this process veered from "how can we improve transit in OKC?". There is no obvious consideration to the current routes and no clear objective to enhance them or compliment them. It's a new route that competes with bus routes. How does that help our bus service?

What "bus system" exists that needs to be complemented? Seriously. We don't have a "bus system." We have at best a sop to receive federal funding. We do not have a functional big-city bus system. It is a joke. There's no reason to delay developing a functioning inner-city streetcar system. Doing so will not disrupt our bus system, because the "system" we have now sucks and needs to be scrapped and redesigned in toto.

Your comments have rhetorical flourish but zero substance. You act as if a functional streetcar system will damage our bus system when in fact our bus system could not be worse.

Why not rebrand transit to attract new ridership and then develop a bus system that complements and expands it?

[betts]

Sure. If wiped the slate clean and started fresh though we'd still have heavy service to places like HSC. And with a bus system using a central hub, this means you have many buses going to the same place. This is that efficiency that a short, but frequent line can solve. Streetcar isn't a hub or a spine. Show me a system in the world that considers it as such. Rather, you will see stretches of rail where you have high demand and you want to either alleviate crowding or consolidate routes (effectively adding lots of 'extra' minutes to all those routes).

Once you see buses starting to coalesce around major destinations, those stops become very good considerations for BRT solutions if they are commuter driven, or some kind of urban rail solution. A streetcar should solve an existing problem in your transit system. And not just 'attract people who don't want to ride the bus'. Right now, nothing has been proposed that solves high value problem in our network. We don't have crowding or redundancy (or even demand) issues along the proposed route. Which means it is simply assumed that a streetcar will cause these things to eventually happen. Why spend money to build a system that is only barely helpful? I'd rather see the money be spent to solve a current problem. One of those is how silly it is to get to HSC from the metro and how many minutes and buses we are consuming to do so. Streetcar can fix that.

Edit: Houston is a good example of this type of thinking and now after running a successful line, they are moving toward expansion with support of the community.

Let's examine a streetcar route to the Health Sciences Center:

Who goes to the Health Sciences Center and when do they go? People work there, but I would guess you have no more than 50 to 100 people who work at the HSC who live in Deep Deuce or Legacy. Throw in a few more who live in Midtown. When do they go there? They go at 7-8 a.m. and they leave at 4 to 6 p.m. Very few people who work a night shift could use any form of public transit easily. Then, we have the people who go to the Health Sciences Center for appointments. They usually have appointments anytime from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and can expect to get out by 6 p.m. at the latest. How many of those live in SoSA, Midtown, downtown or Deep Deuce? Not many. Why do we have the number of people going to the HSC from downtown that we do? Because we drag them all to the bus transfer center no matter where they're coming from. But, how many people actually ride to the HSC daily even doing that? Certainly not enough numbers to overwhelm the existing bus, as I see people getting on and off the bus at the Health Sciences Center. A busy bus drops off 10 people. You could throw in a few more people who go to the ER at night on the bus, but since anytime you go to an ER after 5, you could logically assume you wouldn't be out before the bus stops running. So, I would guess the bus is not utilized by many people going to the HSC in the evenings. There might be a few more people who ride there to their night shift, but I suspect it's low. If you ran a bus every 15 minutes, you might pick up a few more riders to the HSC, but again, the majority of workers there would ride twice a day, with a few people going to appointments sprinkled in.

Now, let's look at other times those people might ride the streetcar. Everyone talks about lunch. Since I work there, I know that the majority of people who work there have no more than an hour for lunch, some less. If you have a streetcar that goes to the bus transfer center, where can you go in an hour? The Art Museum Cafe and a couple other restaurants close by are your only options. Once you get to the transfer center, you're not within walking distance in that time frame to Midtown, nor, even if there's a stop on Walnut are you within walking distance to Bricktown if you have to walk back and forth, eat and ride the streetcar to and from your stop. So, a streetcar that stops at the bus transfer center is valueless as lunch transit. Let's say we add the people who are staying at the Embassy Suites to the mix. We have 100 to 200 people staying there nightly. But again, you're expecting a visitor to know that if they take the streetcar, they can get off on Walnut and 4th and walk down to Bricktown or they take it to the bus transfer center and walk the 6 to 8 blocks to Midtown. That's a long walk in an unknown direction if you don't know the city well. So, the volume of ridership will concentrate at two times: early morning and 4 to 6 p.m. with a few people scattered in between. I would expect it to run almost empty between those two times and afterwards. So, what have we accomplished that increasing frequency on a bus that runs between the bus transfer center and the HSC during the morning and going home hours wouldn't?

The problem with current transit to the Health Sciences Center is the bus transfer center. Why funnel everyone into it? You're creating artificial demand for the route by doing so in one sense and reducing demand in another, as if you had a bus running down 13th St. regularly, as well as other buses on a north-south grid system, it would be easy to change from a north-south bus to one on 13th to get to the Health Sciences Center. A grid system might well increase ridership to the Health Sciences Center, as many of the people who work and use the HSC for health care do not live near the bus transfer center or the 4th St. route. Very few of those people have time to ride to the bus transfer center and sit and wait for transit to the HSC, but they might have time to take two buses on a grid system.

The Health Sciences Center functions much better as a second route than a primary route. If you have a route that connects Heritage Hills, Mesta Park and Midtown to the CBD, Core to Shore, Bricktown and Deep Deuce you've markedly increased the number of neighborhoods and jobs the streetcar serves. There will be people living in Core to Shore before we know it. I'd move there in a heartbeat if the were housing options along the park and with the school going in, I'm not the only person who thinks that, I'm sure. You now serve the many hotels that are going in in Bricktown. With appropriate parking garages, you create park and ride options for people visiting any area along the route, for people going to Thunder and Barons games, people going to events in the parks, going for an evening out in Bricktown or Midtown. If you then add a line to the Health Sciences Center, people who live in Mesta Park and Heritage Hills can easily, because of the rapidity of travel on a streetcar, transfer at 4th St. to take the streetcar over to the HSC. People can stay at hotels in Bricktown if they've got family or business at the HSC, and don't only have the Embassy Suites as an option. But, if they're staying at the Embassy Suites, they can easily take the streetcar to Bricktown or Midtown to have lunch or dinner. If you're working at the HSC, you have a chance of getting to Midtown or Bricktown quickly enough to eat lunch in your allotted time frame (still a stretch, but not impossible now). People who live in neighborhoods around the HSC can get to jobs anywhere in the CBD, Bricktown or Midtown. Extend that HSC line to the Capitol and you've increased access for a lot of people there too.

Then, if you move on to economic development, which should be in the discussion, a route to the HSC has very little economic development impact. The majority of the route has buildings on it and there are slready plans for much of the empty space that it would pass. I don't think economic development is the primary reason to build a streetcar, but it's impact is still valuable to a city that needs its core improved. The area traversed by some variant of the existing proposed route has a lot more economic development potential.

[andrew3077]

So, I randomly ran into Dr. Shadid yesterday at the bookstore, and I asked him about video of the event and he said that they're working hard to get them online!

[kevinpate]

You're right. There isn't near the demand. That is why any mass transit to the airport would have to be part of a regional rail network where people from all corners of the metro could ride a train to a downtown station and then transfer to an airport train. It would even be possible to do baggage check-in in Norman, Edmond, downtown OKC, and at Tinker so people wouldn't have to carry their luggage.

The notion of being in Norman and riding any form of conveyance to DT then switching to another mode of transport to go out to the airport from DT is a non-starter, at least to me. In less time, way less, I can park at the airport or be dropped via a shuttle or family member or friend. There's no clear benefit to me to go into DT first, or go into DT before going to Norman when I return.

[Just the facts]

The notion of being in Norman and riding any form of conveyance to DT then switching to another mode of transport to go out to the airport from DT is a non-starter, at least to me. In less time, way less, I can park at the airport or be dropped via a shuttle or family member or friend. There's no clear benefit to me to go into DT first, or go into DT before going to Norman when I return.

I'll put you down for a no.

For $4 a gallon plus parking fees I would happily take the train, especially if I could get my boarding pass and check-in the bags off-airport. Of course, by the time this actually happens gas will be closer to $6 a gallon.

[catch22]

Who would be paying for the off-airport check-in services and the transfer of those bags to the airline?

I know my company wouldn't pay for dedicated agents to check-in people off airport and I'm not sure we (or I) want to contract (and pay for) that work out and take away work from our company.

Edit: Even if the transit authority paid for it, I don't want jobs from my company contracted out at all.

[Just the facts]

Who would be paying for the off-airport check-in services and the transfer of those bags to the airline?

I know my company wouldn't pay for dedicated agents to check-in people off airport and I'm not sure we (or I) want to contract (and pay for) that work out and take away work from our company.

Edit: Even if the transit authority paid for it, I don't want jobs from my company contracted out at all.

You are starting to sound a little like the concrete cabal at ODOT.

While at Disney a few weeks ago I asked the airport check in people at the resort who they actually work for and who pays them. They work for a private contracting company under an agreement with Disney. They do check-ins for most airlines through an agreement with them as well. If your company doesn't want to lose the business I suggest they submit a bid for the job or don't contract with the private company. For example, if you are flying Southwest you can't check-in at Disney, you have to a carry your bags all the way to the airport and check-in there.

[catch22]

You are starting to sound a little like the concrete cabal at ODOT.

While at Disney a few weeks ago I asked the airport check in people at the resort who they actually work for and who pays them. They work for a private contracting company under an agreement with Disney. They do check-ins for most airlines through an agreement with them as well. If your company doesn't want to lose the business I suggest they submit a bid for the job or don't contract with the private company. For example, if you are flying Southwest you can't check-in at Disney, you have to a carry your bags all the way to the airport and check-in there.

Yes because the employees are unionized and have decided they do not want work to go to the lowest bidder. Once you begin to outsource it never stops...

That's why the majority of flying now is on regional jets, because a long time ago (not really that long actually), pilots began to give up the "low pride" work of flying turboprops to regional airlines flying under the mainline brand. Over the years, this expanded from 19 seat prop planes to 50 seat jets. The 50 seaters expanded to 70 seaters, the 70 seaters are expanding to 99 seaters. Once outsourcing begins, it cannot be stopped. The majority of flying at my company is not even done by my company, low bidders come in and do the work for the lowest possible price. (And quality and reliability suffer as a result)

My job is subject to contracting out with only a 90 day notice and I receive 2 weeks of furlough pay as my "out". I do not want them contracting any work out, because it will eventually expand itself from the train station to the ticket counter, to the ramp.

Would you like it if someone offered to do your job at minimum wage with no loyalty to the company you work hard for and have pride in working for? Someone will undercut you and take your job for minimum wage....fun times.

[Just the facts]

Would you like it if someone offered to do your job at minimum wage with no loyalty to the company you work hard for and have pride in working for? Someone will undercut you and take your job for minimum wage....fun times.

I work in an industry over-run by HB-1 visas who work for 25% of what I make or the work has been shipped to India - then the Philippians - and now Guatemala. Nearly every American I worked with over the last 8 years is either unemployed or has left the industry and it is only a matter of time before it happens to me. All I can say is get used to it –it is happening to all of us. At least this job would need to be performed on-site. Alas, this would be a good opportunity to do a start-up business if someone was so inclined.

Remember though, once the bags get to the airport it is no different than if the passenger brought them there themeselves. They still have to be scanned and put on the plane. Plus, you will always have people like Kevin who will drive to the airport. That group will never go away.

[catch22]

I work in an industry over-run by HB-1 visas who work for 25% of what I make or the work has been shipped to India - then the Philippians - and now Guatemala. Nearly every American I worked with over the last 8 years is either unemployed or has left the industry and it is only a matter of time before it happens to me. All I can say is get used to it –it is happening to all of us. At least this job would need to be performed on-site. Alas, this would be a good opportunity to do a start-up business if someone was so inclined.

Remember though, once the bags get to the airport it is no different than if the passenger brought them there themeselves. They still have to be scanned and put on the plane.

I'm aware of that. But once the outsourcing machine gets started, it is very difficult to stop or even reverse. If airline management had a better track record of keeping their word, outsourcing non-core work wouldn't be a big deal to most employees. But airline management rarely keep their word, and outsourcing any more work than is already outsourced would be a leap of faith for them to say it would only be off-airport check-ins.

[Just the facts]

I can already check-in via my cell phone, tablet, computer, or at a kiosk. The only thing different is instead of handing my luggage to a counter person at the airport I will hand it to the counter person at the train station (who then hands it to someone at the airport). The only requirement is that it stays secure from the time it leaves my hands. If anything, this will result in more jobs. Convenience almost always cost more but that is off-set by not having to drive.

[Just the facts]

Not to get sidetracked but the US is about to enter a whole new economy and companies that don't adjust will get left behind. Our historic economic path has gone kind of like this:

1) Agricultural
2) Industrial
3) Information
4) Service
5) and now...Experience

I am still living back in the Information economy and it is dying quickly. You are most likely in the Service economy which will also fade away. Both of us need to move to the Experience economy (which might be the best argument for finishing the AICC).