A Fresh Start
Sometimes I head out into the world thinking I’m going to gather photos on a particular topic, but accidentally stumble on something completely different and more interesting instead. That’s what happened this afternoon. I’ll start with the intended story first. This is Van Ness Avenue, one of San Francisco’s major thoroughfares. For decades I’ve followed progress on the city’s official plans for streetscape improvements. After endless design reviews, funding negotiations, bureaucratic delays, and sideways permutations it looks like this particular project is finally close to completion.
The model for this specific kind of roadway design is based on innovations created by Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba, Brazil in the early 1970s. He had the challenge of alleviating traffic congestion and improving mobility in a city with very little money. Instead of going deep into debt to expand highways or build a subway system (which were never really a financial option) he and his colleagues invented a highly efficient and cost effective work-around. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) reserved the two center lanes of the road for the exclusive use of public buses so they could travel quickly and frequently without traffic slowing them down. BRT achieved the same results as a subway at one tenth the price using buses and roads the city already had. It was an organizational problem, not one of money or materials.
The first segment of this plan was installed in six days in 1974 and carried 25,000 passengers per day. The city incrementally improved and expanded the system over time. Today over 2,400,000 people use Curitiba’s BRT each day. Double and triple “accordion” articulated buses were eventually brought online to mimic the efficiency of light rail.
One of the system improvements that allowed BRT to perform to a similar standard as a far more expensive subway was the introduction of elevated boarding tubes in 1983. Passengers prepay for their trip so no one has to fumble at the fare box as they enterer the vehicle. The tubes also provide handicapped accessibility and general shelter from the elements.
This system isn’t perfect. There are perennial complaints that the buses are too crowded and the equipment breaks down too frequently due to lack of maintenance. As always, transit is underfunded and struggles to keep up with demand. The political reality is simple. People with money and influence generally don’t use the bus and resent money spent on the system, while the constituency that relies on transit is poorer and less influential. That’s true in many places around the world.
Enrique Peñalosa, mayor of Bogotá, Columbia in the late 1990s, used the Curitiba BRT model to adress similar problems in his city. The Bogotá TranMilenio was introduced as part of a larger program of increased public infrastructure with libraries, schools, parks, and extensive bicycle paths. The travel time to cross the entire city by bus was reduced from over two hours to less than one hour. Of course, Peñalosa had some political challenges to overcome along the way for all the usual reasons. The people who were inconvenience by these changes were wealthy or middle class who could afford cars, while the beneficiaries (the majority of the population) were mostly working class who could not. This necessitated rapid implementation of a tight plan because Peñalosa understood he was unlikely to be re-elected.
Over the years the TransMilenio system survived and expanded to 2,500,000 daily riders. It’s clearly a necessary system, but it isn’t perfect. It’s earned the same reputation for crowding and insufficient maintenance as the system in Curitiba. The alternative would be worse. Adding a couple million more cars to the already congested roads won’t work, especially since most Columbians can’t afford to buy a car in the first place. Public transit is perpetually stuck in an uncomfortable middle ground where it’s asked to do too much with too little. That’s simply the nature of the beast.
This little stretch of road in San Francisco borrowed the basic design from the Latin American model, but it did so within the North American context. Instead of taking a week or a year to introduce the initial phase of a BRT system in an iterative incremental manner, the process took a couple of decades. All the committees, impact reports, and review boards had to slowly grind their way through all their individual and collective protocols until the plan was executed in one fell swoop fully formed at enormous expense. And as always, the people who chafe against this sort of road reconfiguration are the ones in cars while the people who will most directly benefit from the bus system upgrades are near the bottom of society. The buses will be underfunded. Traffic congestion will persist. And we’ll muddle along as we do.
So, let’s go back to my unexpected story. While I was walking along Van Ness I stopped and chatted with a young woman and we took photos of each other. She had just graduated from high school in Tucson, Arizona and immediately packed up and moved to San Francisco. She knew she wasn’t a Tucson kind of girl and needed to plant herself in more fertile soil. In her first week she found an apartment she could afford on her own and a respectable job that pays her well enough to live. I saw a bit of myself in her at that age.
This is one of the many gifts of Covid. The people who didn’t really want to be in the city left and drove up housing demand in places like Tucson. (Housing prices in Arizona are off the charts these days.) Meanwhile, space was freed up for the people who really want to live in a unique urban environment with a local culture you can’t find on a cul-de-sac. Yes, San Francisco has problems, but some of us like the trade offs. The others have found their sweet spot elsewhere. We’ve all been given the opportunity for a fresh start.
