Busy Week
Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit
APTA held its Annual Meeting last week in Charlotte and, as always, it was good to get together with everyone in the industry, see old friends and meet new ones. Thanks from this end to Ron Tober, CATS and the City of Charlotte for being such great hosts while we were there. Between Charlotte and Nashville this year as hosts for a couple of APTA’s shows, it’s starting to make me think about moving South.
Congratulations also go out to Michael Townes, APTA’s newest chairman. I am sure he will make the association proud.
You may have noticed I didn’t address the Annual Meeting in last week’s blog. That’s because even before the festivities were over in Charlotte, I was getting on a plane to head to the next leg of my journey last week — a trip to Beijing, China, to see Beijing’s recently implemented bus rapid transit (BRT) line.
I don’t know what I expected in Beijing. I am old enough to remember the events of Tian’anmen Square, so I guess the whole idea of an imperialistic communist state with soldiers everywhere is what I had in mind. Boy was I wrong!
Beijing surprised me in how Western the city was. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that while I didn’t speak the language, most if not all of the signs were printed in Chinese and English and I could find someone anywhere I went who spoke at least a little English … well, except the taxi drivers.
The BRT system was impressive with dedicated center lanes setting it off from traffic, signal priority and level boarding. It zipped past traffic so congested our “highway first” folks would be screaming bloody murder to get several new lanes put in. No wonder it was standing room only on board!
With all of its buses (20,000!), Beijing sees more need for transit and is looking to expand with several new BRT routes and more than double its subway system. What’s the most interesting about this is the timeframe they are looking at. Adding BRT routes in two years! Doubling their subway system in four years?!
I understand that, especially with the subway, this amazing timeframe goes part and parcel with the government being fully behind such an endeavor and them being able to marshal a tremendous amount of workforce to get it done. But here in the states we could get BRT systems up and running in as much time in many locations.
The problem is with the incessant dickering that goes into the creation of any sort of new or expanded transit project. Not only on a funding level, but design and implementation as well. It’s almost like transit opponents are trying to filibuster projects out of being completed like lawmakers at the capitol.
I just hope we can take a page from other agencies, nationally or internationally, who have that mentality of finding what works for them and doing it without hemming and hawing and apply it to all of our systems.
Thanks for reading the MT Position, updated every Friday.
October 20th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Yea in Milwaukee we have at 91.5 million dollars of federal money dedicated for mass transit sitting around for something like 15 years because nobody can agree how to spend it.
October 22nd, 2007 at 8:25 am
Transit is just not taken seriously in this country. Oil and autos and trucking are, because they serve the interests of private INDUSTRY, that is, profit. Transit serves the interests of private CITIZENS, and they have little to no clout. It’s even something that makes you seem a bit strange to your suburban neighbors when you extol the virtues of using transit and having one car for when you really need it. But we ARE out here. The blogs show that, even if we are, for the most part, talking to ourselves.