You want to put your dedicated bus lanes on one-way streets.
Of course, you will not be putting your lane in the median of the one-way avenue, as shown above. So it won’t be quite the same as the nice picture, now will it?

But sure, put the bus lanes at curbside, no problem — except from the merchants complaining that the dedicated lanes will interfere with deliveries, not to mention taking away a lane of parking. And your turn lane will be in the middle of the street, not adjoining the curb.

Not exactly like the illustration at the top of this post.

Honestly, we need a more rigorous discussion of Bus Rapackaged Transit, and not allow such trafficking in illusions.

I’ve been to Curitiba. Nice city. I wish them luck with their planned rail line. But their Metro BRT is like nothing in the US, and we will not have anything like it in NYC. Some of their bus routes pre-empt the entire narrow street. Any city in the US turned over a street to a busway? Fulton Street in Brooklyn, kinda, sorta? Any city in the US moved on from BRT to replace it with rail, the usual dishonest promise made by BRT advocates?

It’s one thing to work up a nice illustration of idealized BRT service. Not too hot, not too cold, but in the pictures, always just right. But we’re way short of real world BRT success stories in this country. But after 8 years or so of this Bushie favored program, we have several failed efforts around the country to give us caution.

And if we don’t have plenty of room, why do you think we could build streetcars?

The illustration above makes room for BRT by carving out space from a 10-LANE STREET. We don’t have those in NYC, unless you cut down all the trees lining Eastern Parkway. The damned illustration is a lie.

We don’t have plenty of room to put bus-wide dedicated lanes on our streets and avenues. So it won’t happen. We’ll get some diluted “mostly for buses” sharing with traffic lanes. So we’ll get bus routes with slower times and lower ridership than promised, leaving us with a great disappointment after wasting major effort and large amounts of money.

The European experience has been that streetcars always attract more riders than the bus routes they replace — with about a third of the new riders former drivers. And of course, streetcars are more energy efficient and cost less over time, because the steel wheel on smooth rail vehicles outlast the rubber tire on pot-holed road buses.

I can understand BRT on Fordham Road, it’s very hilly and the steep grades would have challenged streetcar construction. But most of NYC is perfect terrain for trams.

It’s about enforcement and regularity of use. Whenever I take NJTransit I always notice that the buff ticket collectors can kick my ass much faster than the average NYC bus driver. Some thug may get away with knifing a bus driver when he is asked to pay, but that won’t fly with the fare checkers they should have on pre-pay buses.

The other thing is that most regular users will have monthly MetroCards, and for them it will be neither desirable nor possible to avoid paying every once in a while.

But as far as the Bx12’s “honor system”. Frankly, honor systems are for the antebellum South and feudal Japan. What else is there to expect from a riding public of entitled shuckers-and-jivers.

Other cities with a pre-pay system had the foresight to replace their open-air bus shelters with enclosed, heated/cooled, camera-monitored, comfortable kiosks that you can only enter into from the sidewalk through a turnstile. Also the only way to get on board the bus itself is directly through the kiosk, not the sidewalk. And none of this so-last-century magnetic card nonsense, when they can have touchless/smart cards instead.