why nyc's new dedicated crosstown bus lane owes a debt to bogota, colombia

8/8/2019 Why NYC's New Dedicated Crosstown Bus Lane Owes a Debt to Bogota, Colombia

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Article location:http://www.fastcompany.com/1567557/bogota-schools-new-york-city-in-urban-planningMarch 2, 2010Tags: Design, Enrique Peñalosa, Janette Sadik-Khan, Bogota

Why NYC's New Dedicated Crosstown Bus Lane Owes a Debt to Bogota,

ColombiaBy Cliff Kuang

Urban planners, rejoice! Today, the New York City Department of Transit announced a radical new plan [1] forimproving the city's bus lines: A fully dedicated express-lane for buses, running crosstown on 34th Street. It's expectedto improve bus speeds by 35%, on a route where buses are stationary a whopping 40% of the time. And it marksanother huge, bold idea from Janette Sadik-Khan, the DOT commissioner who's overseen a slew of projects, rangingfrom the new sidewalk saffolding [2] to a pedestrianized Times Square.

That's a coup for harried New Yorkers, but there's a bigger story here, and one other outsize urban visionary: The NewYork proposal marks a huge coup for an idea that began in Curitiba, Brazil; and then was co-opted in Bogota,

hy NYC's New Dedicated Crosstown Bus Lane Owes a Debt to Bogota, ... http://www.fastcompany.com/node/156755

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Colombia; and it's now been spread around the world by Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogota who's becomea globe-trotting evangelist for better urban planning.

During his tenure as Mayor, Peñalosa installed the TransMilenio system in Bogota (pictured above, via GOOD [3]),which has a slew of innovations, in addition to dedicated express bus-lanes: First, to increase the robustness of thenetwork, smaller "feeder" buses trundle through outlying areas, bringing them to centralized stations--much like thehub-and-spoke system for airlines, or train systems across the world. The buses themselves are designed to minimizewaits: The fare is collected beforehand, and the floor of the bus is low slung, so that passengers can board morequickly. Real-time systems let riders know exactly when the next bus arrives--a key component in encouragingridership. (For our previous coverage of TransMilenio, click here [4].)

For Peñalosa, the system solved the problem of cheap, scalable mass transit: Bogota is choked with traffic, but Bogotasimply couldn't afford a new subway system. So they had to adopt an innovative alternative. And they found that modelin the buses of Curitaba, Brazil (pictured below).

The idea turns out to have been a tremendous success, both in Colombia and Los Angeles, where a version of theTransMilenio, the Orange Line, began operating in 2005. Since then, traffic along its route during the morning rush hour


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is moving 14% faster, and the rush hour itself begins 11 minutes later.

With lots of American cities finding themselves with the same problems as Bogota, youcan bet we've only begun to see the influence of the Transmilenio, and Peñalosa.

[Via StreetsBlog [5]]

Links:

[1] http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/ferrybus/34thstreet.shtml[2] http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovation/new-york-takes-

aim-ugly-scaffolding-lollipop-colored-design[3] http://www.good.is/post/get-on-the-bus/ [4] http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovation/home-worlds-most-advanced-bus-system-bogota[5] http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/03/02/dot-plans-to-bring-nycs-first-separated-busway-to-34th-street/


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why nyc's new dedicated crosstown bus lane owes a debt to bogota, colombia

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