Enrique Penalosa is the Mayor of Bogota and brother to Canadian bicycle advocate Gil Penalosa. Enrique expounds publicly on his crisp views about active transportation and transit. In this article from The Guardian, he minces no words:
“Mobility is a very peculiar challenge for a city – different from health or education – because it’s one problem that tends to get worse as societies get richer. But above all, we must understand that an advanced city is not one where poor residents use cars, but one where rich residents use public transport.
When we introduced bicycle paths in Bogotá nearly 20 years ago, when I was mayor here the first time, it was seen as a crazy idea. Back then, there were no bikeways in London, Paris, Madrid or New York. Now, of course, so many people are interested in this movement – particularly young people.
If all citizens are equal, then somebody who is walking or on a bike has a right to the same amount of road space as somebody in a Rolls-Royce or luxury car. And a bus with 150 passengers has a right to 150 times more road space than a car with one passenger. Which means we should give exclusive lanes to buses and create Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems; it’s the only solution.
In Bogotá, our BRT has the same speed and the same capacity as a subway; indeed, we move more passengers per hour than any subway in Europe. And in the future, we will ensure – either via the new subway or BRT lines – that more than 80% of the city’s population lives less than 1km from a mass transit line.”
And here is my favourite phrase from Enrique:
“The whole challenge of urban mobility is not an engineering challenge but a political one. Today, it’s almost as unjust and absurd to see a bus in a traffic jam as it was, a century or so ago, not to allow women to vote.”
Bogota’s experiment with BRT is indeed a roaring success and worthy of consideration in other cities. However, it is not easily transported to every jurisdiction, nor is it a justified substitute for more expensive subways in every case.
When advocates cite mind-numbing ridership and cost statistics they also need to give equal attention to an obvious fact: BRT and most forms of surface LRT are most successful when the geometry allows it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio#/media/File:Av_Am%C3%A9ricas_Transmilenio_Mundo_Aventura.JPG
In the photo above it’s plain to see that the BRT line is placed in a humongous road allowance that probably exceeds 75 metres in width. In this and other photos it’s obvious that the Bogota BRT system is largely contained within separated rights-of-way, and that the maximum length of their articulated buses do not exceed three sections.
You cannot just airlift these images and plunk them down onto Vancouver’s Broadway corridor or, for that matter, jurisdictions without the same road geometry including long stretches without signalized crossings or large volumes of cross traffic.
Where you have the space and right site conditions, go for it. Where you don’t, be prepared to spend a lot more money on total separation with possibly rail-based transit that can eventually max out with automated 8+ car trains.
Hopefully the photo will appear below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio#/media/File:Av_Am%C3%A9ricas_Transmilenio_Mundo_Aventura.JPG
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/07/09/world/28334711.JPG
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
Former mayor Enrique Penalosa was a leader; a champion – how few there are.
Imagine if Mr: “Do I smoke crack? No, I don’t smoke crack. Have I smoked crack? Yes, in a drunken stupor” – had been Bogota’s mayor. Carmageddon.
The Ted talk by Penalosa is one of the better ones. My kids loved seeing cars on unpaved potholed streets while buses and cyclists got paved priority.
That said, I wonder what is the tipping point in terms of cash and convenience to get people out of their SOVs.
In my case, virtually nothing would induce me to take transit. Have never been a transit user. Doesn’t even cross my mind – took Skytrain once this year, on New Year’s eve, with my 9-year-old; not to go anywhere; just for entertainment. The Expo and Millenium lines are better than a double-decker tourist bus. Canada Line is a bore.
If my soon to be 24-year-old car croaked, much as I’m as motor obsessed as every idiot male, it would be foolish to buy another. Car share would be the logical solution. Taking an Über-type service would be a distant second. If these were subsidized the way public transit is, the latter mode would shrivel.