Bus Tracks

The One Thousand Villages series continues, as we return to the suburbs of Flatsville, our new town in the state of Arkowa.

Wanting to avoid the sins of past American cities and avoid creating a sparse and energy-inefficient sprawl that we may become unable to maintain, our Metropolitan Planning Authority has decided to plan with an eye towards public transit from the beginning.

At this point it becomes very tempting to just put trams in everywhere.  They’re reasonably quiet, they don’t emit fumes, people love riding them, and property developers view them as a long-term investment.

Unfortunately, trams are quite expensive.  And, quite frankly, it would be highly irresponsible for the MPA to build such heavy public transit without knowing where the densest areas of the city will be!  We can’t just dedicate an entire zone to only hotels - what do you think this is, Brasilia?

But the MPA does have enough control to place large medians on the sides of roads at certain frequencies.  Our zoning regulations will require that these medians can only be filled with grass and trees.  People will be told this is for city beautification and the reduction of road noise, but actually our plan is to go back and bulldoze the trees and put in more road and public transit lanes.  So that much is sorted.  Simple enough.

So trams are too expensive.  But there is another form of public transport that is cheaper, more flexible, and which can run on ordinary roads, without electrification.  The humble bus.

Unfortunately, Americans hate riding the bus.  They associate buses with common riff-raff and those too desperate or poor to own a car.  The form of transport of last resort.  But somehow, to reduce the car traffic and increase our city’s density and efficiency, the MPA must convince residents to ride the bus.

Americans love trams and trains, however.  (Who doesn’t?  There’s just something so romantic about them.)  So perhaps we could get our residents to ride our transit system that costs a fraction of light rail if we could make the experience more like rail.

We could start with a dedicated bus lane, but our development contract with the state legislature only lasts for fifteen years, and painted-on bus lanes tend to get eaten by cars due to politics.  We need something a little sturdier.  Something, hmn, rail-like, that the cars won’t see as just another car lane they’re being denied.  And then we could make the buses glide in to the bus stops, flush with the platform, just like a train.

Enter the Curb-Guided Busway.  A cheap aftermarket mechanical device is added to an ordinary bus, which is guided by two concrete tracks.  Our buses will have a smooth, fast ride without having to fight cars for their lanes, but can continue to run on normal roads, making for a very versatile system.

There are other improvements we can make to our bus network…

• Traffic Signal Priority, to give our faster route buses priority over cars.
• Bus sidings, to allow longer-route buses to skip stops, and as part of…
• Higher quality Bus Stations, including shelter.  With curb-guidance, our buses will always come in smoothly, level with the platform like a train.  We can also install digital panels to track the locations of our buses in the network and display accurate estimated arrival times.

To further promote our bus uptake, we can add park ‘n’ rides at the edges of our transport network, and limit building bus stations to locations where we can make them quality bus stations that will keep our network high status.