With a metropolitan population of 21 million, the largest of any city in the western hemisphere, Mexico City is often associated with overcrowding, air pollution, and traffic jams. But when I visited for the first time last month, I found it to be a place of beautiful Spanish colonial and art deco architecture, intriguing museums, tasty chow, and warmhearted people.
The road to full-fledged BRT in Chicago has been anything but smooth. In 2012 the CTA rolled out the Jeffery Jump, a “BRT-lite” route serving the south side, funded by an $11 million Federal Transit Administration grant. It features dedicated lanes on a mere two miles of its 16-mile route, and only during rush hour.
While it was supposed to have doubled cross-Loop bus speeds from the previous, glacial, 3 mph rush-hour pace, that hasn’t happened yet. Last week, a 0.8-mile trip I took on Madison between Michigan and Canal took 11 minutes.
As with the Ashland plan, residents and merchants along the Insurgentes corridor worried at first that converting a travel lane in each direction to bus-only use would slow down car traffic, which was already grinding along at an average of 7.5 mph at the time, Navarro said. Instead, by replacing the many privately run “Microbúses” on the street with a single bus line, the BRT system actually increased traffic speeds by 4 to 7 percent.
I asked Navarro what the best strategy is to convince Chicagoans that Ashland BRT is a good idea. “It’s really a matter of policy,” he said. “Do you want to keep having really car-oriented development, or do you want to change that and have more transit and sustainable development?”
John Greenfield edits the transportation news website Streetsblog Chicago.
