London 2012: Public Transport Olympics

London is hosting the Summer Olympics in 2012, and it's promising a radical solution to the transportation problems inherent when hundreds of thousands of people come together in a two week period to watch sporting events.

The plan is to require all attendees, with the exception of a few handicapped individuals, to use public transport to get to the events. That's a ban on cars, folks. To do so, the city will construct new train lines, extend cycling lanes, use exclusive "Olympic Lanes" on motorways, and allow no parking facilities near the stadia. The plan is here.

Considering that London is claiming that its Olympics will be the greenest ever, this step makes a lot of sense. London has one of the largest public transportation networks in the world, and it should be able to handle the traffic. The most important question, however, is whether citizens of the city will alter travel trends in the future because of investment now.

Not Messing Around

The Urban Planning Authorities in Beijing have approved the construction of six new subway lines. And they plan on starting work on (all?) of them by year end. From the limited amount of press info:

The six new lines - the No. 6, 8 and 9 lines, the second phase of the No. 10 line, and the Yizhuang and Daxing lines, have a total length of 152 kilometers, according to the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning. They will be completed in 2012.

Crisis in Chicago

There is no transit system in America more in danger than Chicago's CTA. The nation's third busiest rail system, after New York and Washington, and third biggest transit system overall, after New York and Los Angeles, the CTA has been facing budget problems for years. Now, however, it looks like there's not much to do in order to avoid massive cuts.

Basically, Chicago's transit system has no reliable source of money. Over the years, management has campaigned vigorously to do something about the problem, to get the state government to institute a special tax, or to receive special appropriations from the state government.

But that hasn't happened. So now the agency expects to have to make drastic cuts. Not only will costs to ride dramatically increase, but the number of bus routes provided will be more than halved. Thousands of employees will be fired by November. The CTA expects to lose 250,000 daily riders.

This is a catastrophic situation, and it shouldn't be happening. There's a this site, where you can find out how to make sure these cuts don't happen.

In this age of improved transit just about everywhere else, Chicago doesn't need to see its system fall apart.

Transit Agency Awards

The American Public Transit Association gave out its annual awards recently. The best organization awards went to:

This year's winners:

• City of Elk Grove, Transit Services, Elk Grove, Calif., for agencies providing fewer than 1 million annual passenger trips;
• St. Cloud Metropolitan Transit Commission, St. Cloud, Minn., for agencies providing more than 1 million and fewer than 4 million annual passenger trips;
• Capital Area Transportation Authority, Lansing, Mich., for agencies providing more than 4 million but fewer than 30 million annual passenger trips; and
• Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, Cleveland, for agencies providing more than 30 million annual passenger trips.
• APTA also presented the 2007 Innovation Award to Greater Bridgeport Transit Authority, Bridgeport, Conn., and Utah Transit Authority, Salt Lake City.

If you're a transit buff, how many of these systems have you either been on before?

BRT not exactly working in Santiago

BRT is all the fad in South America, where projects such as the Transmilenio in Columbia and the RIT in Bogota, Brazil, have awakened the world to the possibility of improving transportation through the construction of rapid bus routes. For god's sake, as we've covered on this site, even New York City, home of the world's largest subway system, is getting into the game.

The simple fact is that BRT is a lot easier to implement than rail-based transit, because it can use existing roads and buses are a lot cheaper than trains. The problem, of course, is that if you don't pay enough attention to the details, BRT can really mess up. And become a major problem.

Santiago, Chile, which already has a relatively large metro system, has developed a new bus system called Transantiago. Basically, it replaced 3,000 bus companies with about 10 ones, all private, operating in a far more coordinated system. The only problem, as NPR reports, is that it's not working very well. Though it's an improvement over the old system, which was awful to the environment, using old buses, and which induced heavy traffic because of extreme competition between all the bus companies, this isn't exactly the best solution we've seen.

The city isn't exact ready for prime time, without the GPS devices on the buses found elsewhere, few dedicated bus lanes, which are essential for any BRT program, and an overall heavy reliance on the subway, which has increased traffic on that system by a monumental 1,000,000 a day!

What this story really points out to all of us is how tricky it may be to try to implement BRT, and how easy it is to mess up. BRT may seem like an easy and cheap replacement for trains, but it's not that simple.