Ashland Ave BRT 3, The route we left behind.

Now I want to turn back the clock and compare the proposed, center running Ashland BRT with the one I thought was a no brainer, Western Ave, Parking and Median  Removal.

The main disadvantages of this plan would be the removal of both the median and parking on one side of Western.

The parking removal seems terrible but nothing says it all has to be on the same side. The entirety of Western Ave is lined with high schools, hospitals, parks, shopping centers, strip malls, used car lots, factory blocks and fast food joints. Get the picture? These are all places with their own parking lots. In fact there are only about eight blocks where street front commercial and residential uses (these uses rely on street parking) dominate both sides of the street.

O.K. You would have to make the traffic lanes slalom from the east to west to take advantage of this, but that could be a good thing. Increasing the complexity of the road way  should have a minor effect during the peak hours, when everyone is traveling slow and following the guy in front, but it might serve to have a traffic calming effect in the overnight hours when a wide open, dead straight road encourages driving above the speed limit..

You would have to annoy about 150 Property owners and LAZ., but LAZ has only 532 parking spaces on all of Western. Even if we eliminate half of them, LAZ could easily be bought off by increasing their holdings on the cross streets. There are a hundred spaces on North Ave alone that would make LAZ wet their pants if they thought they could a hold of them.

Median removal? This is a joke. The median on most of Western is a stripe painted on the asphalt. For ¾ mile the median is a bridge to nowhere that they have been talking about removing for 40 years. For five miles, the median is a 100 foot wide park and there are two Westerns on both sides. There are only a few blocks of actual raised medians on the whole street.

How about a line by line comparison

           

                                   Western curbside             Ashland center running

Bus speed                         15.6mph                           15.9mph

Increased boardings   9549 new riders            8440 new riders

Average late bus           39secs                               22secs

Pedestrian space           30ft                                   43 ft (inc 14ft station)

Traffic capacity lost      0%                                     50%

Cost                                     110 million                     165 million

Why did they choose the current proposal?

The only advantage it has over the Western proposal is the loss of traffic capacity.

I am not a conspiracy nut. I think Oswald was the lone gunman. I think that 85 yards is such an easy shot, even with a junk rifle, that if anyone thought of putting a second shooter on the grassy knoll, it would have been dismissed as a waste of manpower.

But here’s what I think.

I think that center running traffic lane removal was the plan all along.

I think they played the community like a cheap violin. Ginning up fears of parking and planted median loss. Hyping percentage improvements in reliability speed and “transit use share” until travel lane removal seemed like a reasonable choice.

I think they chose Ashland simply because they thought the fall out would be less.

I don’t believe that they are doing this to force some municipal vision of a transit state or bicycle utopia. I don’t think that even the mayor has that much clout.

I think their reasons are much more mundane.

I suspect that somewhere out there is some ginormous federal grant for congestion abatement and we are being trampled while the city fathers scramble to get a piece of that pie.

The fact that the 2014 budget shows that CDOT plans for an additional 200 million dollars (over last year) in federal infrastructure grants, only reinforces that suspicion.

 Paul K. Dickman