By Mark Kinnucan

Several years ago I went to Ottawa, Canada, to attend a conference. I decided to take public transportation from the airport downtown. The available public transportation turned out to be a bus. However, much to my surprise and delight, the bus did not head out onto the highway for the trip into town. Instead, it maneuvered onto a kind of roadway I had never seen before. It was a dedicated road just for buses. The stops along it looked like the stops for commuter rail systems. In fact the whole set-up looked just like a light rail system, except that what was running on it wasn’t trains, but buses. On rubber tires.The best part was when my bus got downtown. Since it was, after all, a regular city bus, it just drove off the dedicated road (which, I learned, the Ottawans called a “transitway”) onto the downtown city streets. The whole thing, I decided, was the neatest thing since sliced bread.

What I had stumbled onto in Ottawa is one of North America’s premier examples of a relatively new concept in urban transportation, called bus rapid transit (BRT). The basic idea of BRT is to combine the speed and convenience of rail transit with the flexibility, range, and lower cost of buses. Even more than the speed and convenience, BRT systems strive to capture the “feel” of rail. Some of this is accomplished through the way BRT systems are designed, and some of it is accomplished through the way they are marketed.

The fundamental idea of BRT is to replicate rail’s greater travel speeds and greater spacing of stations. (Notice that they’re “stations,” not “stops.” That’s part of the marketing: this is a transit system, not a bus route.) Greater running speeds are most easily accomplished through dedicated roadways, as in Ottawa. On regular roads, running speed is increased through preemption of traffic lights. Other common features of BRT include distinctive vehicles, advance collection of fares (no lines at the farebox), and attractive stations with level boarding.

The New York area’s latest contribution to BRT is New York City’s Bx12 “Select Bus Service” line, which is slated to begin running between northern Manhattan and the Bronx in June. Long Island’s lower population density makes BRT more of a challenge here. Nonetheless, projects have been proposed in both Nassau and Suffolk. In Nassau, a BRT line was proposed in the Nassau Hub Major Investment Study, completed in 2006. The next phase of the Nassau Hub project, carrying out environmental impact studies, is scheduled to begin later this year. No concrete progress has been made to date in Suffolk, but the idea of a BRT line along the Route 110 corridor was presented at last October’s Long Island Mayors'and Supervisors' Institute on Community Design.

Long Island needs innovative transportation alternatives.With its tremendous flexibility,BRT merits serious consideration in transportation planning for the Island.

(Entree to information on the Web about BRT can be found at http://www.tstc.org/issues/brt.html and at http://www.calstart.org/programs/brt/new/index.php?p=programs)