BRT is not as pemanent as rail. I know it could work in the short term, but in the long term, busways make less sense. This short term thought process is what’s being used to favour BRT and make it look better than LRT. They just like BRT on Geary more because it’s cheaper, and according to them, in my opinion, cheaper is better. Cheaper is not necessarily better. I would not want to treat transit investment as being like an investment in the stock market, which is what they seem to do.

Are you familiar with the geography of the area?

I suppose every situation has its own unique combination of engineering and political issues, but what I read suggested that things would be designed to enable an upgrade to light rail when/where possible. It could be a wise move indeed to get a wedge in and then go from there rather than to be so unrealistic that nothing happens. There is no reason to think either that a BRT line is permanent or that it somehow undermines rail. I wish rail proponents were more open to acknowledging the potential benefits of BRT. That said, I have never lived in a place with BRT. So …

BRT is a swindle in general to me. After 11 years of living here (I moved from Newfoundland), I’m convinced that BRT is an attempt to convince us that we can do without rail. Bad.

If we replaced this with LRT, you would be stuck with only two surface tracks that travel no faster than traffic, which is very slow in SF due to commute congestion, as well as suffering long boarding/deboarding times due to the high numbers of riders. There would be no way for any LRT vehicle to pass another, so everyone would be forced to take a painfully slow ride to/from downtown.

Additionally we already have multiple articulated (i.e. double-capacity) buses that back up 2 or 3 at a time along Geary and that still is sometimes not enough capacity to handle ridership (estimated at 45,000 daily I believe). What would be the point of having LRT after LRT backed up along rail on this corridor? I really don’t see how this would be an improvement – instead it would be a massive fiinancial expenditure that would please train types but would potentially degrade service levels. If we are willing to judge transit modes based on their pros and cons and not pre-conceived biases, BRT has more going for it than just a low implementation cost and surface-running LRT is inappropriate for this corridor.

SF residents ride buses despite their drawbacks. Turning the Geary line into Muni Metro would not solve anything in my opinion. BART along Geary as a complementary service would be very fantastic, but I’m not holding my breath.

Also, Yonah, as far as bike or ped improvements to the corridor, I see nothing about this in the SFMTC report. Geary is a terrible street to walk or bike along but I don’t see that changing unless even more auto lanes are removed and we all know that’s not going to happen. There will be no bike lane or multi-use path. Sidewalks will continue to be inadequate for the high numbers of pedstrians. The SFMTC clearly did not even consider those issues in their analysis, or if they did, they gave up and omitted them from the report.

I hope this works out ultimately. These studies have been taking forever and I don’t see anything going into service until 2015 or 2016 based on the current pace and the MTC’s track record for implementing projects. Likewise the omission of improvements east of Gough is criminal in my opinion, but I’m hopeful that this will result in an improvement to transit along this corridor and the chances of Geary BRT being a boondoggle are much lower than, say, the Chinatown subway, which I think is a disaster already 10 years in the making.

I consider it irresponsible to further the stigmatization of buses.

I grew up with buses on Geary. They were not the problem. Rather, they were good, frequent, clean and efficient. Narrow streets trying to accommodate too much automobile traffic was the problem.

Good transportation planning does not benefit from minds too small to have enough space for more than one idea.

An important geographical point that you didn’t mention is that while the entire corridor is dense by American standards, there isn’t really a western (outer end) anchor needed for a strong rapid transit line. On the contrary, at the west end of the line, the project has been bedeviled for decades by concerns about impacts on on-street parking in the Richmond commercial strip, and in San Francisco’s intensely democratic polity, that matters.

The disappointment is not that this is BRT, but that it’s not going to exist east of Gough. Presumably buses are going to run in the existing poorly enforced bus lanes across downtown. Until that problem’s addressed, it will be wrong to call this a complete rapid-transit corridor or a complete example of BRT, though of course people will call it that and use it to judge BRT a failure.

BRT vs LRT comparisons often ignore the fact that BRT, by its nature, is easy to compromise. The commonest such compromise is to say “downtown, it’s just too hard.” That’s how Ottawa got to where it is, with a world class busway pouring into downtown surface streets that are over capacity to an almost comical degree.

Yes, the next generation may get to see rail transit in the corridor, but we’ve been waiting long enough for functional rapid transit on Geary. It’s time to build what we can, while demanding a better solution downtown.