Streetsblog San Francisco

Muni’s brand new buses are rolling in. The first of the 62 low-floor, 40-foot long hybrid New Flyer Buses purchased by the SFMTA are being prepped at a Muni maintenance shop, as captured by Dave Longa on Flickr.

As we reported, the SFMTA plans to roll out 13 of these buses this month, followed by a roll-out of 5 buses per week from May through July, replacing motor coaches that have been in service in 1999. Not only should the low floors make the buses easier to board, but the biodiesel-fueled hybrid engines are expected to require far less maintenance than the old buses. That means Muni riders can look forward to some nice, clean vehicles and worry a little less about breakdowns making them late for work.

Good news for Muni riders who are tired of bus breakdowns: Muni will get 45 new low-floor, biodiesel hybrid buses to replace its aging fleet. The agreement was approved yesterday by the SF Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors.

The buses, which will be similar to Muni’s existing hybrid buses rolled out in 2007, will replace existing diesel buses that have been in service since 1999. The buses will be purchased from New Flyer Industries in Minnesota — different models than the existing Orion hybrids, but they will use the same doors by request of the SFMTA, according to the agreement [PDF]. As Streetsblog wrote in 2009, the touch-activated rear doors on Muni’s hybrids can be difficult to open for many passengers.

All of the new vehicles will be 40 feet long, which is the larger of the two sizes in Muni’s existing hybrid fleet. Of the current 86 hybrids, 56 are 40 feet long, and the rest are 30 feet.

The buses not only save on fuel, pollute less, and require less maintenance, but their low floors are also easier for passengers to board, since there are no stairs to climb. That means less time spent waiting for passengers to board, while those with wheelchairs can use ramps that come equipped on the buses.

The total cost of the purchase is $33.8 million, or $752,000 per vehicle, which comes from federal, state, and local funds, according to the SFMTA. The agency says it also plans to replace 60 articulated buses within the next two years. Those buses have been in service for 20 years.

Muni expects to receive the new hybrids by the end of summer 2013.

The SF Municipal Transportation Agency received more than $21 million in federal funds to purchase new buses and implement improvements like colored bus lanes, transit priority signals, and bus-mounted enforcement cameras, the agency announced today.

The funds come from the Federal Transit Administration’s Livability and State of Good Repair grant programs. In total, the FTA will provide $45.7 million for transit upgrades on systems throughout the Bay Area, including BART, AC Transit, SamTrans, and the Valley Transportation Authority.

Muni, which has the oldest transit fleet in the nation, will be able to replace 18 twenty-year-old buses with low-floor, biodiesel hybrid buses using the $15 million State of Good Repair grant, according to a news release. Another $6.4 million, which comes from the Livability grant, will be used for these improvements along the 8x Bayshore Express line as part of the 8x Mobility Maximization project:

• Coloring of existing dedicated transit lanes;
• Transit signal priority;
• Pre-payment fare collection;
• Information panel and transit arrival prediction signs;
• Vehicle branding and enhanced stop identification; and
• Cameras on buses to capture vehicles illegally occupying transit-only lanes.

“Investments in optimizing existing service and enhancing the customer experience will not only help us better serve our current customers, but also will help attract new customers,” said SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin in a statement. “Underscoring San Francisco’s Transit First policy, the SFMTA will direct these funds to frontline Muni service.”

The grants are part of a nationwide package of $787 million in transit investments announced by the FTA today.

This is the second in a series of reports about sustainable transportation policies in Mexico City. Last week, Streetsblog participated in a tour of the city led by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. A previous installment covered pedestrian improvements in the city and a third will discuss its bicycle planning.

After a precipitous collapse, buses are on the rebound in Mexico City.

When the city’s public bus system fell apart during the political and economic turmoil of the 80s and 90s, Mexico City residents were left to rely on a fleet of private microbuses that was extensive but slow, dangerous, and heavily polluting. Now, the city is quickly building out a bus rapid transit system called Metrobús that’s making surface transit fast, safe, and healthy. “It’s the most important initiative in the city in the last 25 years,” says Mayor Marcelo Ebrard.

On the Avenida de Insurgentes, where the first Metrobús line opened in 2006, the distinctive red buses pass by in continuous streams, even when it’s not rush hour. At midday, the gap between one bus and the next was rarely longer than the time it takes to load and unload passengers at the previous station or to wait at a red light. Each bus was full. Clearly, demand is high, perhaps higher than the system can handle.

Each of the three Metrobús lines offers a full set of bus rapid transit features. Riders cross to the median of a wide avenue, where buses run in each direction on physically separated lanes. A ramp leads up to an enclosed station, where you tap a smart card against the turnstile to enter.

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Crossing the Bay from SPUR on Vimeo.

SPUR has produced a new video that asks: How will 1.7 million more people cross the Bay? From the SPUR blog:

In the last century, visionary planners made major investments linking San Francisco and the East Bay. When the 20th century dawned, the only way to get from San Francisco to Oakland was by ferry. We built the Bay Bridge during the Great Depression and the BART tunnel in the early 1970s. It’s been nearly 40 years since then, and the Bay Area has grown by 2.7 million people. Yet we’ve added no new capacity. Even the new Bay Bridge, currently under construction, won’t help: It will be much more resilient to earthquakes, yet no bigger than the bridge it replaces.

SPUR’s first recommendation is to get more people on buses by building what would be a relatively cheap short-term solution: a contra-flow westbound bus lane on the Bay Bridge that would accommodate up to 10,000 new passengers an hour. Its second recommendation calls for incremental improvements to BART, including a better train control system along with trains that have more doors. The third is a long-term recommendation that would require big capital dollars: constructing a second transbay tube to boost BART’s capacity, and potentially accommodate high-speed rail.

The video is SPUR’s first entry into animation and video making. It’s a product of the organization’s 2009 project and report, “The Future of Downtown,” which focused on reducing job sprawl and strategies to expand job growth in San Francisco’s transit-rich downtown. It argued that downtown SF, namely SoMa, has “by far the greatest near-term potential to accommodate regional employment growth with a low carbon footprint.”

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Transportation options for undocumented immigrants are becoming narrower and narrower in the U.S. Whatever you may think of immigration policy, there are about 11 million people living in the shadows in this country who have ever fewer ways to get around.

Immigration agents have been boarding Greyhound buses to nab undocumented immigrants, according to a story in Sunday’s Miami Herald. Anecdotal evidence from immigration attorneys and detainees shows that public transportation is becoming a favorite place for agents to hunt down immigrants:

“I am definitely seeing a large number of people stopped by Greyhound,” said attorney Sara Van Hofwegen… On one recent visit to the BTC in Southwest Broward, Van Hofwegen spoke to 12 detainees. Five of the 12 were apprehended on a Greyhound.

“I’d say Greyhound cases make up about 20 percent of our clients now,’’ said Juliet Williams, an assistant with the law offices of Kantaras & Andreopoulos, with offices in Central Florida. “That is much more than we’ve usually seen.”

She estimates the firm has seen an increase in Greyhound apprehensions of about 25 percent in the past two years.

There is no longer a single state in the union that will issue a drivers license without asking any questions. But has the crackdown over the past few years stopped people from driving? Of course not. It just means that many are driving without accountability, and without paying.

But even if they do stop driving, no matter: ICE will just catch them on buses and trains.

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Our daily urban lives shape our imaginations in so many ways. Few things box us in like our everyday transit options, and the patterns of traffic that shape our sense of public space. These patterns themselves are historical of course. A quick look back at the famous Market Street film shot a few days before the 1906 earthquake shows how chaotic and unpredictable the flow of traffic was when San Francisco’s main artery hadn’t yet been paved and standardized. Similarly, leaving the U.S. and visiting other countries provides a fantastic opportunity to experience other assumptions and possibilities for urban space, and surprisingly perhaps, a different range of vehicles.

In Peru for a couple of weeks I first had to adjust to a major cultural difference–unlike California, pedestrians don’t have any legal rights, let alone cultural preference. When you start to cross the street at a corner in a Peruvian city, you better be ready to run. Because the cars are not going to wait for you, in fact they tend to speed up when they see someone trying to use the road space ahead of them. I noticed the same thing on highways too, a consistent refusal to yield to entering traffic, a universal assumption of individual ownership of the right of way. Here’s a video below the break we shot standing on a traffic island in Peru’s second largest city while waiting for the traffic to clear so we could cross the street.

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While many Americans may not think riding a bus is the sexiest form of transportation, the reality is that a majority of public transit trips in the U.S. are taken by bus. The numbers are even higher in the Bay Area. Every one of the hundreds of thousands of passengers who boarded a bus in the last year has a story to tell and there are probably lots of Streetsblog readers who would love to share a tale about their favorite line. So why not nominate it as the best bus route in America?

Transportation Alternatives, New York City’s advocacy group for bicycling, walking and public transit, has joined with GOOD Magazine for a contest asking public transit riders to email in their photos and brief captions making a case for why their bus ride is the better one. From GOOD’s website:

Bicycles can be chic, subways artful, but buses? Buses are not exactly the golden child of transportation. They’re more like the red-headed step child: Deep down you know they mean well but they’re just a little harder to love.

Yet public buses are an essential form of transit in cities across the country, and they account for a big chunk of the nearly 10.2 billion trips Americans took on public transportation in 2009. We think it’s time to give a little love to one of the least celebrated modes of transit. To that end, we’ve teamed up with Transportation Alternatives and an impressive group of bus-loving jurors to see and hear why your bus route is the best in America.

What is it about your bus route that you love? Is your bus driver brilliant? Is the view from your window breathtaking? Do your fellow riders characters belong in a Hemingway novel?

The judges include Earl Blumenauer, Enrique Peñalosa and TA Executive Director Paul Steely White. I’m honored to also be a judge. You only have until next Wednesday, November 10th, to submit your entry. You can email them to busroutes@goodinc.com or tweet the entry to @GOOD and use the hashtag #bestbusride. Good luck!

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and FTA chief Peter Rogoff announced the winners of $293 million in competitive grants for bus and streetcar projects today. The biggest chunks of funding will help build streetcar projects in Cincinnati, Charlotte, Fort Worth, and St. Louis, as well as rapid bus corridors in New York and Chicago. All told, the funding will be distributed among 53 projects, chosen from more than 300 applicants.

While streetcar projects got the largest individual grants, most of the funding will go toward bus projects, including a number of grants for smaller cities to build, expand, or improve stations like Des Moines's Multi-Modal Transit Hub. Several bus projects have an information component, promising to make service more predictable and convenient by giving riders a clear sense of when buses will arrive.

Also on the list is Boston's regional bike-share network, slated to receive $3 million to help build more than 500 public bicycle stations. The bike-share project made the cut because of its potential to expand the reach and accessibility of the bus and rail system. Boston's bike-share launch recently got pushed back to 2011, but at that scale, it would be, by far, the largest system in the country.

Here's a sample of the major projects that got a boost:

• Cincinnati will receive $25 million to help build a six-mile streetcar route, with an eye toward spurring mixed-use development downtown. The city planning commission recently took the enlightened step of reducing parking requirements along the future streetcar route.
  
• Chicago received support for a pair of rapid bus projects: $11 million for the Jeffery BRT corridor, which will improve service to major job center on a route with poor access to trains, and $25 million for a two-mile, east-west bus priority street serving several routes downtown.
  
• New York City's 34th Street busway got an $18 million grant. Streetsblog NYC readers have been following this project for a couple of years. NYCDOT recently announced its intention to make 34th Street the first physically separated busway in the city.
  
• One of the surprise winners was Fort Worth, which received about $25 million for a 2.5-mile one-way streetcar loop, intended to serve as the hub in a future network. Streetsblog Network member Fort Worthology called the grant "incredible and extremely positive news" for the larger streetcar project.
  

You can see the complete list of projects here.

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Should private transit companies enjoy the same federal gas tax exemption that many public operators receive? How does the existence of private inter-city bus service affect the government's development of new high-speed rail lines? And does it matter that private transit firms are eligible for public subsidies, even if at a much smaller rate than public rail and bus agencies?

Few definitive answers to those questions were on offer today at a transit panel sponsored by the Mobility Choice coalition, which allies members of conservative-leaning think tanks with a handful of environmental advocates and urbanists -- but the discussion yielded some provocative evidence of the fault lines between public and private operators.

Principally sponsored by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS), the group describes itself as adopting "a fiscally responsible, free market oriented approach to expanding competition among transportation modes for the purpose of reducing oil's strategic value."

American Bus Association (ABA) Chairman James Jalbert, whose group represents private bus and motorcoach companies, lamented that the U.S. DOT's implementation of its $10.5 billion high-speed rail program -- which is expected to receive billions more in federal funding in the coming years -- did not envision a role for private-sector firms that already provide inter-city service.

"A good-quality system that could be included in a rail project is now going to be run over by that rail project," said Jalbert, also the president New Hampshire-based bus company C&J. "We want to be part of the solution, but we need to be invited to the party."

Integrating private bus operators into proposed passenger rail projects has to start at the state level, where officials make the call on whether and how to pursue federal bullet-train money, Jalbert added. He described a potentially successful partnership between public inter-city rail and private bus companies as a shared scheduling system, where passengers could purchase tickets for rail during peak hours but an equivalent bus journey during off-peak times, when operating a motorcoach could be more efficient.

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