Damek.

Shamelessly copying (to save time) from a comment I made at The Oil Drum NYC…

Finally having some time away from BMCC classes, and being a relatively new UES resident who wishes we had a 2nd Ave subway wisely completed ten years ago or more, I went with Alex to a special Upper East Side forum on Bus Rapid Transit last night. I went to this meeting knowing nothing about BRT. I certainly didn’t know this had been in the works for a long time.

Not knowing that, and having to leave after the guy from Transportation Alternatives spoke, I had a more positive reaction to the meeting, thinking “well, good, I’m glad something is going to be done about 2nd Ave transportation.”

But I did get that the MTA planners were vastly underreaching, compared with what the Transportation Alternatives rep presented, and I felt that whatever was going to be done, it was likely to be a half-arsed effort.

Further reading at the Oil Drum post I mentioned above, and at Aaron Naparstek’s site here, I find my feeling seems about right. Naparstek writes:

All of these studies have been going for years and none of them have been implemented in any meaningful way… An MTA source working on a part of the BRT in the Bronx study tells me that the initiative is being stymied by New York City Department of Transportation traffic engineers. To make BRT work you have to dedicate lanes exclusively to buses. My MTA source says that DOT simply doesn’t want to give up its roadway capacity to buses. So they are doing what they can to nibble away at the proejct, slow it down, and kill it. As the Oil Drum points out, the last night’s BRT meeting was totally YIMBY. Communities on the East Side of Manhattan, waiting decades for their 2nd Avenue subway, want express buses. Elected officials are all in favor of it. The only opposition appears to be coming from within the city’s transportation bureaucracy itself.

And what can someone like myself do but “write letters and make phone calls?” And people wonder why more citizens don’t get involved in government.

It seems the norm in America, and New York especially, to take great ideas, even ones that have been implemented successfully elsewhere, and then plan to fail, sometimes in the name of being cautious, only partially implementing important features. Inevitably people point to these efforts as failures and the idea is never tried again anywhere. In the meantime, the public has to suffer through a bad system that was designed to fail.

NY transit authorities seems to be heading this way with BRT.