bravo

OCTA staff listened to a proposal at a recent Transit Advocates of UC Irvine meeting in which they asked for better OCTA transit service. 40 students attended this session along with OCTA planner Gordon Robinson and OCTA CEO Will Kempton.

OCTA has already made some improvements to UC Irvine's transit service. A little over a year ago, OCTA planners re-allocated trips to include more southbound 79 buses to relieve standing-room only conditions during peak commute hours. OCTA also made permanent a detour that serves UC Irvine's core students and Gottschalk Medical Plaza better (see below). Plus, they've recently added UC Irvine as a station for their future rapid bus system in their proposed long-range transportation plan.

Here are OCTA's permanent re-routings. They now serve the core of campus better, serving the School of Medicine, Gottschalk Medical Plaza, Beckman Laser Center, the Trevor School of Arts, the athletics center, and the new humanities building directly. 

But TAUCI believes more should be done. Currently, 27,600 students (not including staff) attend UC Irvine. OCTA's line 79 is the only bus line that runs through UC Irvine on weekends — every 80 minutes — and students have no regular daily bus routes that connect to the airport, Amtrak, or Metrolink stations. According to TAUCI president David Weinreich, they also discussed:

• Needing larger buses on route 175 to people due to frequent pass-bys and late buses
• Using advertising on bus stops to pay for desperately-needed schedule info
• Needing to have routes 70 & 90 meet at Culver — instead of Tustin Metrolink Station — to require one less wait & transfer for students coming to/from the route 79 (the most commonly used route by students).
• How OCTA's plans to boost Metrolink service is useless for UC Irvine students because of UC Irvine's distance from a station. TAUCI stressed that bus rapid transit lines would be much more preferable to frequent Metrolink service.

Their presentation included some useful facts like these:

What I think should even be done: OCTA should fold that (and may I editorialize) useless Newport Transportation Center into UC Irvine's hub. These two hubs compete for buses, and there will be a much higher demand for OCTA buses this coming year because UC Irvine will house another 1,500 or so students in new housing units, and Newport Transportation Center has no transit-dependent population nearby.

Route 1 — perhaps with a combination of the anemic route 76 — can serve to pick up the meager boardings in Newport Beach.

Having route 57 run to UC Irvine will give students access to Angel Stadium, an Amtrak/Metrolink station on weekends (okay, a 10-minute walk to Anaheim Station), UC Irvine Medical Center, South Coast Plaza, and Costa Mesa's clubs. WOOT.

Having route 1 run to UC Irvine will give students and Irvine residents a one-seat joyride to all of the beaches Orange County has to offer: Long Beach, Seal Beach, Sunset Beach, Huntington Beach Pier, San Clemente Pier, Laguna Beach, and Dana Point Harbor. Folks coming from Central Orange County have to transfer to the 1 anyways, so why not expand this to a transit-dependent population: UC Irvine students?

What do you think? Crazy idea? It's not going to cost *that* much money to re-route some buses, but will there be a trade-off for non-students? read more→

Anaheim's about to blow OCTA and local funds on 3.5 miles to serve a handful of stops between Disneyland and the new Anaheim Station area (named Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center (ARTIC)).

According to the OC Register, the city considers this Go Local project as a solution to relieve the congestion on their 8-lane-wide local roads. Their options include:

• Increasing bus traffic in existing lanes.
• Building dedicated lanes for more buses.
• An elevated monorail (25-40 passengers per car, 30 mph)
• An elevated people mover (80-100 passengers per car, 20 mph)
• A low-speed magnetic-levitation train (150 passengers, 30 mph)

The article then proceeds to do its pitch for a monorail and notes that Anaheim really wants to build an elevated system. I myself noted that Anaheim's Guideway estimated construction cost of up to $500 million would have kept OCTA's Bravo! rapid bus system in operation for more than 40 years. How Anaheim will strong-arm the rest of the county into paying for this is beyond me:

So far, $5.9 million from the Orange County Transportation Authority 'Go Local' funds and $100,000 in city funds have paid for planning and design. Riding the monorail or other elevated system would be kept relatively cheap – or perhaps free...

I've covered this project before and I'm no fan of either elevated option. This project presents a fantastic opportunity to serve both local riders and county-wide riders, and building dedicated lanes and stations for buses can be an attractive, most cost-effective solution to Anaheim's congestion on local roads. If Anaheim constructs any kind of rail system, it would be logical to integrate this with Los Angeles's proposed Metro Rail extension to Santa Ana and Santa Ana's plans to link Garden Grove.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling that moving Anaheim tourists, not Orange County citizens, is Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle's priority here, and they badly want their fixed guideway. You can pretty much see Anaheim's efforts to sabotage the bus rapid transit (BRT) option: Anaheim claims that BRT will have to operate in mixed traffic, and they only state a seated capacity of 60 (even though BRT's true capacity is actually 180 for seated and standing). BRT really doesn't have to operate in mixed traffic at all:

What's even funnier is that, in their slides, they use the defunct Bravo! rapid bus project as an example of a BRT stop. Really, with the "$$$" expensive cost of a train from ARTIC to Disneyland, OCTA could've built out a real transportation option throughout the county and for Anaheim tourists as well, like Bravo!:

Thus, my disillusionment with OCTA's Go Local projects.

The public has an opportunity to provide input on Anaheim's 5 options. Visit http://www.anaheimfixedguideway.com/get-involved and write your comments in by December 10, 2009:

Anaheim Fixed-Guideway Transit Corridor Study
c/o Jamie Lai, Transit Manager

City of Anaheim

Public Works Department 

200 S. Anaheim Blvd., Ste. 276
Anaheim, CA 92805  read more→

For better or worse, the Transit Committee (including Directors Brown, Dalton, Dixon, Green, Nguyen, Pulido, and Winterbottom) voted November 12, 2009 to kill the Bravo! rapid bus project. OCTA's plans for improving countywide transit have been politically unpopular, and my impression has been that the general public and politicians have never been enamored with the concept of true bus rapid transit. This unfortunately means that OCTA's transit riders are saddled with the same long travel times that plague OCTA's crippled transportation system. Will Kempton's excuse for killing the project: "current restructuring of the bus system and financial pressures."

Instead, OCTA staff will shelve Bravo into its 2010 Long-Range Transportation Plan. And, as a replacement, it will pour the money into traffic signal synchronization along Harbor Blvd, Westminster Blvd, and Bristol St/State College Blvd. The final Board vote comes this Monday during the Board of Directors meeting.

The Bravo! bus rapid transit — a replacement for their light rail program — was supposed to have launched in 2007 and faced continuous delays in its implementation. I can't help but feel envious watching Los Angeles continuously improving their public transit experience — they just opened the new Gold Line light rail extension, they'll be launching the Silver Line bus rapid transit later this year, and they've got several more light rail lines planned.

More gory details after the break. read more→

OCTA asks, "How would you improve central O.C's Future Transportation System? Have your say right now here" in a posting last week to the Santa Ana Community Development Resource Network.

Take the two minute survey and share your "transportation tips." If you think transit is the way of the future, register your opinion with a click of the mouse. Or maybe you think it's better to increase and improve connections to Metrolink? Or perhaps you believe its best to enhance our streets and/or expand or extend freeways. Whether you think some of these, all of these, or none of these, are good ideas, click your mouse on http://www.surveymonkey.com /s.aspx? sm=PvOkciehFgboK QRKyM8saw_3d_3d now and have your say today!"

Fernando Chavarria
Orange County Transportation Authority External Affairs Division
(714) 560-5306 fchavarria@octa.net

Some of the survey's proposals make sense — including bus rapid transit with dedicated lanes, and traffic signal synchronization — while others are pretty crazy (or creative, depending on how you look at it). On the left, OCTA proposes to run an expressway at the bottom of the Santa Ana River, during the dry season. And below, OCTA is proposing running a freeway in a tunnel underneath the river.

What do you think? Should we promote healthier transit alternatives, or keep on building freeways in Orange County? Vote now. read more→

Bravo! looks to be still on track for launch next year. The biggest changes to OCTA's new limited stop bus service, thus far, is (1) the addition of UC Irvine to the network, and (2) the removal of Downtown Long Beach as a destination. Although thus far they've hired an outside consultant for traffic signal priority, all signs from OCTA so far still indicate that the project is neutered.

OCTA CEO Will Kempton's memo claims that there's no space for dedicated transit lanes; I beg to differ, as I routinely walk across 11-lane intersections on Bristol St and The City Drive. 11 lanes on a local road?! Surely, there's space. Here's Chapman Ave/The City Dr, for example:

The memo also claims that mixed-flow lanes are the way to go — even though OCTA buses along line 57 get stuck in traffic during rush hour. I've witnessed many bus bunchings. And a recent report on OCTA fareboxes indicates that it's too expensive for them to provide ticket machines at Bravo "stations" — even though they can considerably speed up buses by cutting down on boarding times.

The memo, addressed to Curt Pringle, Anaheim mayor and an OCTA Director, tries to get him to understand why the Bravo project is so important. I guess Pringle still hasn't quite figured out this project. Pringle earlier this year insisted on slashing Bravo! stops — to create an "express" bus between his beloved Anaheim and the beach — but the memo says that isn't a wise idea and actually decreases ridership.

The memo's an interesting read. Here it is, for your reading pleasure (and salivation!): read more→

OCTA has quietly de-listed Downtown Long Beach as a proposed destination from the new Westminster-17th line as part of the Bravo! limited-stop bus service rollout. All mentions of Downtown Long Beach were removed from their website and its corresponding Westminster-17th PDF publication.

Downtown Long Beach was a part of the line that spanned Tustin, Garden Grove, Seal Beach, and Long Beach, as a faster (and dare I say more rapid) version of the slower-moving line 60. However, OCTA recently cut line 60 so that buses wouldn't travel farther west than at the VA Hospital and Cal State Long Beach. Unfortunately for riders, the move has forced bus riders to transfer to and from Long Beach Transit at an additional cost.

In other Bravo! news, a recent Google Image search turned up this future website promoting the Bravo! service. Not sure when it's to be deployed, but the website was completed in mid-2008, when OCTA was supposed to have launched the new bus service:

read more→

Unfortunately, almost all of OCTA's publicly-released material isn't accessible (as in, hundreds of pages of documents through a black-and-white scanner into a hastily-assembled un-searchable PDF). So, I present to you OCR'd text from this document given to the Transit Committee on June 11, 2009.

The good news: the project will happen one way or another, or else OCTA will lose lots of federal funding. (word from the grapevine)

The bad news: again, it doesn't seem OCTA's very enthusiastic about the project. There's barely any public outreach. They keep cutting back on elements of bus rapid transit so much that it can no longer be called "bus rapid transit." OCTA sends flashy 4-color brochures to millions of homes about the Obama stimulus, versus zero marketing effort for the Bravo! limited-bus project. And the limited-stop buses may cannibalize local bus service if OCTA doesn't get CMAQ funding.

Obviously, if you're not into gory policy details, a lot of this is yawn-inducing. But it's fascinating to learn where the money (or, lack of money) for the Bravo! limited-stop bus project is coming from.

Here's the OCR'd text: read more→

Serena Maria Daniels published a report on the Bravo! project in the Orange County Register that says traditional "rapid transit" features will likely be cut from Bravo, essentially downgrading Bravo! to a series of limited-stop bus lines.

Some interesting tidbits from the article:

The transportation authority approved a $133 million budget for the project in November in 2005. Since then, the budget has dwindled to about $20 million, resulting in cuts in some express line features and plans to use existing buses instead of new ones for the Bravo! line.

"We're trying to save as much as possible," said Gordon Robinson, Bravo! project manager.

...

Robinson said the authority will not cut service from existing routes to make way for the Bravo! lines.

To help cut costs on the rapid bus line, Robinson said some of the gadgets common among other transit agencies' express lines will be put off at least during the beginning, including real-time alert signs at bus stops letting passengers know when buses will arrive and traffic-signal-synchronization devices that make lights turn green faster.

In the meantime, the authority plans to synchronize street lights along Harbor, 17th Street/Westminster, and Bristol, State College. Synchronization involves setting traffic lights along an artery so that they turn green together, allowing vehicles to travel unimpeded.

The Bravo! limited-stop lines plan to begin service in June 2010, September 2010, and December 2010 for the Harbor, Westminster-17th, and Bristol-State College lines, respectively. December 2010 is the last date OCTA can implement the service in order to comply with air quality requirements. read more→

OCTA's rapid bus project, Bravo! (erroneously called "BRT") is still on track for opening in the summer of 2010.

Despite the budget cuts, the rapid bus is funded from a different pot of money. A handout from last Thursday's transit committee meeting stated: read more→

Bravo!, the stupid name, in my opinion anyway, for Orange County's proposed "not-quite-BRT" rapid bus network, is the key to revolutionizing mass transit in Orange County. While all the drama surrounding budget cuts is going on it's easy to forget about Bravo!, which I believe was scheduled to start in 2008 but has been steadily been pushed back. It's the mass transit equivalent of vaporware. read more→