We may not be Paris… but we can certainly be better
By Annie Weinstock
It’s a familiar trope: New York is not London or Paris or Amsterdam. This phrase, rather than being used to vaunt those things truly great about New York, is most often used as a defense of its mediocrity.
NYC is not alone in this kind of thinking. My work in urban transportation has taken me to a lot of countries with vastly different people and extremely different urban forms. Nearly every place believes it’s exceptional in its inability to make streets cleaner, safer, more equitable, and more fun.
Of course, cities are different from one another, sometimes vastly so. But when it comes to changing the urban form in climate- and people-friendly ways, there is no engineering reason why they couldn’t be more like the world’s best cities— safe, walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented environments with plenty of public space for people of all ages to enjoy life.
An international benchmark exists for BRT
When I was at ITDP, I helped to create The BRT Standard. BRT is simply a set of elements which, together, prioritize buses over cars, as well as a few elements that make bus travel more accessible, enjoyable, and connected into the rest of the transit and bike network.
The BRT Standard is a recognition scheme like the LEED rating system for buildings. It was developed with a group of international experts, from a variety of cities and organizations, who worked on many of the world’s most successful BRT projects. The Standard doesn’t mandate standards, but it does establish a benchmark that captures those elements which have consistently increased bus speeds and quality of service in the widest possible range of cities: small, large, developing, and developed.
The BRT Standard was controversial. Many people claimed that every city is special, so no standard was possible. Some cities and countries developed their own (always weaker) standards to fit their “special circumstances.” Those standards sometimes highlight local examples of very good practices, but too often they simply justify designs that cater to the needs of motorists at the expense of bus passengers — all in the name of exceptionality.
Building a BRT that scores well on the Standard is a matter of political will, not of urban form. Sure, it must be sized to its context. Stations should be scaled according to demand. Passing lanes may or may not be needed. Corridors should be selected based on demand and routes should be designed around where people are going. But the basic elements — median lanes or fully segregated lanes, mixed traffic turning restrictions, all-door boarding, level boarding—always make buses go faster. There is no city in which the local culture or urban form requires that a bus lane be designed adjacent to the curb.
Accepting that there is a standard for good BRT engineering, there are many ways in which cities can and should express individuality in BRT design: Bus branding, stop and station architecture, and system names can all be crafted to express a city’s identity. BRT stations can even include art designed by artists local to each station’s neighborhood.
International best practice for bike design
On the bike side, most would agree that the Netherlands or Denmark have the most progressive, most effective bicycle infrastructure. So why mess around? Platform CROW developed a manual that informs bike infrastructure design in the Netherlands.
Building more safe and protected space for cyclists is a matter of political will, rather than of engineering. Platform CROW provides the engineering tools for doing it well. Like with BRT, there may be corridors where heavier bike infrastructure is more needed than on others. But every major city can develop and sustain a cycling population if the right infrastructure is provided.
Every place wants to reinvent these wheels
Many cities, at least in the US, have developed their own “bus priority toolkits” and bike design guides, either as standalone documents or as part of individual street design guides. Some even go so far as to call their bus priority toolkits, BRT standards — what is standard about that?
The Philadelphia Transit Plan: A Vision for 2045 includes a bus priority toolkit. All of the designs in the toolkit are weaker in terms of bus priority than the median alignment and/or full busways prescribed by the BRT Standard. Most are curbside bus lanes, which are known to have myriad problems (as I’ve written about before). Some are peak-hour only and some allow right turning cars to share the lane.
The Denver Bikeway Design Guide states that, “The Denver Bikeway Design Guidelines were created based on national standards and guidelines and are tailored to meet the unique context of Denver.” The guide is certainly progressive by US standards but is a far cry from international best practice.
Why did Philadelphia and Denver feel the need to invent their own bus and bike toolkits? Most likely because it allows them the opportunity to legitimize weaker interventions. And yet it costs cities time and money to develop and update their own standards. Maybe they should just adopt international best practice and call it a day.
Of course, what constitutes international best practice, and what goes into the standards, can certainly be debated and modified. But debating the finer points of existing standards and watering down a standard under a separate cover, are different things.
The reason New York isn’t like its climate-friendlier, safer, more people-oriented international counterparts is because its leadership doesn’t want it to be. The first thing the next mayor should do is adopt international best practices in all areas of sustainable transportation (and other sectors too, why not) — and then follow them.
