Fast Transit
VTA has a vision for a better transit system in Santa Clara County. A transit system that works for more people, more reliably, and more quickly. The “quickly” part is fundamental, because a major barrier to more people using transit is speed. Even if sitting in a car in traffic is frustrating, and gas is expensive, people overwhelmingly choose it over transit if it’s faster.
VTA and other transit authorities are aware of this problem and, more importantly, they’re aware of solutions to transit speed problems. VTA’s Fast Transit program is a framework for identifying and prioritizing those solutions to transit speed problems and implementing them across the county. It covers everything from large infrastructure solutions all the way down to individual interactions on vehicles. If we measure the “size” of the solution by the amounts of time and capital each would require to implement, we can broadly separate the solutions into three groups.
Large Solutions
One of the biggest and most obvious factors affecting transit speed is the same factor that affects every driver in the county: traffic. It’s obvious to anyone who’s driven in any major city in the US during rush hour that as the number of cars increases on a road, the speed of those cars decreases.
The obvious solution to this is to take the buses out of traffic with bus lanes! If buses can zip by traffic, sitting on a bus seems a lot more attractive than sitting in traffic. The biggest obstacle to this solution is that VTA doesn’t own the roads; VTA must work with cities and the county in order to get this kind of infrastructural solution built.
Another major issue affecting bus speeds is having to exit traffic for boarding and alighting, and then waiting for a chance to enter traffic again. Bus islands remove this issue by providing a protected space for passengers that sits next to the road, allowing a bus to simply stop in the current lane. This solution has largely the same obstacles as bus lanes, in that VTA must work with other jurisdictions to get bus islands built.
Medium
In the middle of the size spectrum are things that may or may not be completely within VTA’s control, but they’re nowhere near as expensive as the previously mentioned solutions. These solutions are bus stop placements, upgrading some routes to frequent routes, and transit signal priority.
The ideas that VTA can control are bus stop balancing and route upgrades. Bus stop balancing involves shuffling bus stops around to achieve the optimal number of “four to five bus stops per mile”. If there are too many stops too close together, that can slow buses down as they keep pulling out of and back into traffic. And by upgrading routes to Rapid, they can run extra lines that hop over stops, like the Rapid 522 and 523 lines; these routes run along the same routes as the 22 and 23 lines, but don’t stop at every bus stop.
The solution that will require collaboration with cities across the county is Transit Signal Priority (TSP). TSP is a technological solution that adjusts the timing of traffic lights in response to changes in location for transit vehicles. When vehicles are approaching a light, the green light might be held a bit longer. Or if a vehicle is sitting at a red light, that light might be shortened. But as mentioned earlier, VTA doesn’t own the streets; VTA will have to work with city leaders to get TSP installed at stop lights around the county. VTA has a great article that dives into more details about TSP, including some cool things like how signal controller cabinets are secured!
Small
All the way down at the other end of the scale are things that are both completely in VTA’s control and probably not that expensive (compared to the other solutions listed). The ideas that VTA is investigating are currently centered on fare payments. VTA is looking at ways to make it easier and faster to pay, including having a way to pay your fare before boarding the bus. They’re also interested in removing barriers to people who don’t yet have a Clipper card, or still rely only on cash fares.
While these items might seem small, they happen so many times a day that in aggregate they can have a significant impact on transit speed! The faster folks can board a bus, the faster the bus can pull away from a stop and get back on the road.
This was just a brief introduction to Fast Transit, but VTA has a lot more information about these important ideas. And they’re going to be doing a lot of work to get feedback. This autumn and winter they’re expecting to do 28 community outreach events, with another 28 next spring!
If you’d like to join the conversation with some of the folks at VTA, they’ll be hosting a focus group online during our next transit meetup on December 16 at 6:00 PM. You can register for the group at https://FGTransitAd.eventbrite.com.
Remember, the best thing you can do is tell your elected officials that you want these solutions! Too often the only people who bend politicians’ ears are folks who don’t want anything to change, and that means more of the status quo: slow traffic and more cars!