Transit Streets are Living Streets
Great transit brings more people to a street in less space than other modes, creating nodes of activity around stations and along routes. Designing transit streets as linear public spaces enhances both the attractiveness of transit and its ability to support healthy urbanism.1 Shift vehicular priority from cars to transit to unlock space for parklets, plazas, bike lanes, and sidewalk cafes.
Prioritize Transit at Every Scale
On streets of every size and context, design can directly improve transit travel time, reliability, and capacity. Major projects like dedicated transitways can substantially increase transit speeds and the total person capacity of a street.2 On smaller streets, fine-grained improvements like bus bulbs and signal timing combine to transform the way the street works.
Design for Growth
Streets that comprehensively prioritize transit create an upward spiral of higher ridership, better service, local economic growth, and more compact, sustainable development. Basic transit accommodations are not enough to support future growth; high-quality transit calls for efficient and comfortable stops, coordinated signals, and dedicated space. Combine these with mixed-use zoning and expanded city services to fundamentally remake a transit corridor.
Transit Streets are Active Streets
Transit streets are built around safe, low-stress, and complete pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure. Transit riders are active users of the street, relying on comfortable sidewalks and bikeways—and orderly motor vehicle traffic moving at safe speeds. Intuitive travel paths and frequent opportunities to cross the street make it easy and safe for people to get to transit stops, and are essential to building ridership.3
Design Changes Demand
As streets become more heavily traveled, repurposing space for transit can dramatically increase ridership, bringing more activity to the street. Investments in transit-supportive infrastructure attract new riders and reveal latent demand for better transit service. Street design powers a shift to transit, walking, and bicycling by making them the most attractive travel modes—safe, convenient, efficient, and enjoyable.
Near-Term Projects, Long-Term Plans
Implementing transit improvements quickly with interim materials can demonstrate the value of dedicating space to transit and can build support for broader change, while informing public discussions around street design. Use low-cost materials to change street geometry, unlocking opportunities for new types of transit service, improving walking conditions, and testing new ideas while preparing for longer-lasting capital construction.
- Repurposing street space for transit can have a strong safety impact as well—research from around the world has demonstrated that rededicating lanes for exclusive transit use can reduce crashes 12–15%; other transit priority designs have reduced crashes more than 60%.
Duduta, Nicolae, Claudia Adriazola-Steil, Carsten Wass, Dario Hidalgo, Luis Antonio Lindau, and Vineet Sam John. Traffic Safety on Bus Priority Systems: Recommendations for integrating safety into the planning, design, and operation of major bus routes. The WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, Washington, DC: 2015. ↩︎ - Bus lanes on a major street, coupled with all-door boarding and spot improvements at three intersections, improved corridor transit travel times on average 19-23%, with negligible impact to vehicle traffic.
Beaton, Eric B, Evan Bialostozky, Patrick Dougherty, Taylor Reiss Gouge, and Theodore V Orosz,. Designing the Modern Multi-Modal Urban Arterial: A Case Study of the Webster Avenue Bus Rapid Transit Project. Paper presented at the Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC: 2014. ↩︎ - Factors like presence of bicycle and pedestrian facilities, mixed land uses, and transit stop amenities have all shown significant positive correlations with transit ridership. However, the most significant indicator to ridership is transit level of service—transit frequency, transit alternatives, and route density—at a given stop location.
Dill, Jennifer, Marc Schlossberg, Liang Ma, and Cody Meyer. Predicting Transit Ridership At The Stop Level: The Role Of Service And Urban Form. Submitted to the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC: 2013. ↩︎