Imagine a scene from Humboldt County's future: Eureka, March 22nd, 2010. Doctors, lawyers, clerks, production workers, secretaries, professors and students wait on the platform. When the vehicle arrives at the station, they board, tickets in hand and take to the comfortable seats. Their ride smoothly accelerates and begins to breeze along toward Arcata. As they depart, a few passengers look up from their reading to see the traffic congestion they are passing. In a few minutes, most of the passengers de-board and walk to work or catch a connecting bus.

To some readers, this scene may have sounded like future in which the Humboldt Bay Area is served by a commuter rail or light rail. Nope. Rail transit ain't gonna happen in our micropolitan area. To have an effective service, you need two rails. We have just one, and if it ever gets trains on it, it will be with freight, precluding regular passenger service. Rail is very efficient for heavy freight, but buses actually carry passengers more efficiently with regard to fuel, space and cost.

If we succeed in creating a first class mass transit system for Humboldt County, at its core will be a Bus Rapid Transit system (BRT) running from McKinleyville to Fortuna, and perhaps beyond. This would be a near-impossible infrastructure development goal for light rail. What is BRT? It is bus service with most of the advantages of rail service, but at much lower cost. BRT typically involves a combination of dedicated lanes, signal prioritization and queue jumping to give buses the ability to breeze through traffic-congested areas. Stops are more like stations, spaced further apart to speed travel, and with raised platforms to expedite boarding. Features like pre-board ticket purchase shorten stop times. Put it all together, and you get something as fast, convenient and efficient as light rail for roughly a third the cost or less.

How could BRT be applied to our area? Well, obviously it would have to be a gradual process. We don't have the ridership yet to support a whole new system, but we could get there through incremental improvements. The key would be to gradually evolve Redwood Transit Service (RTS) into a BRT system.

We actually are farther along then most people realize. The new hybrid buses are low-floor (which speeds boarding). If we keep replacing buses with low-floor models, that feature should be on all buses in another 5 or 10 years.

RTS buses also already have signal prioritization capability, and it just needs to be installed in the traffic signals. The technology makes signals turn green as the bus approaches so you never get stuck at a red light on the bus. This would also improve emergency services, helping emergency vehicles arrive on scene more quickly and safely.

As far as dedicated lanes and well-spaced stations, McKinleyville might be the best place to start. McKinleyville residents have expressed their desire for development of a downtown character in their central business district. BRT could help. Besides, there is still enough space and little enough congestion on Central Avenue to dedicate median lanes to BRT and perhaps put the street on a road diet¹. With a few well-placed permanent stations could anchor nodes of compact, mixed-use, walk-able development of a "new-urbanist" downtown.

The two keys to BRT are making it direct and fast, and having it penetrate existing high density areas. In Arcata, this would be easy. With two freeway median stations, one at the pedestrian bridge and one at 11th Street, with an additional access tunnel from the Transit Center, Downtown, Northtown and HSU could be well-served, and the bus wouldn't even have to exit 101.

BRT would probably have to find success elsewhere before the challenges of Eureka could be tackled. Eureka is where I anticipate the most opposition, which is ironic, because it stands to gain the most from BRT. Eureka is the only place in Humboldt County where congestion is a problem. The bottleneck at Broadway and 5th will continue to get worse and never be resolved without a freeway bypass all the way around Eureka, costing hundreds of millions of dollars - either that, or BRT! With more folks choosing to ride the more convenient bus, congestion will be relieved. One full bus equals forty cars off the road. But people won't choose to ride the bus unless it is convenient. There isn't enough room for dedicated bus lanes right at the bottleneck, but there is room on 4th and 5th Streets, and a little further south on Broadway.

The 5th and Broadway bottleneck is the perfect place for a queue jump. Here's how it works. The bus approaches the end of its dedicated lane as it nears the bottle neck. The traffic signal turns red for the cars at the last intersection, and green for the approaching bus. Once the bus gets ahead, the cars are released to create their own congestion behind the bus, which is ahead of the pack, and makes it to its dedicated lane on the other side of the bottle neck unimpeded.

Currently, 85% of trips to work in Humbodt County are by car and only 1% are by mass transit. Theoretically, Light Rail could turn the tide, but it ain't happenin' anytime soon, and I want some rapid transit I can use, not just dream about. Bus Rapid Transit is not far-fetched at all. With public support, and our elected officials behind it, we could see BRT running in less than ten years. That might be just in time to mitigate for $8 per gallon gas with a carbon tax added on!

¹A road diet is a technique of transportation planning in which the width of a road or lane is narrowed in order to lower traffic speeds and improve safety for all road users. Additional space freed up by removing and / or narrowing vehicular lanes can be used for bike lanes, sidewalk expansion, beautification projects or dedicated bus lanes. For more info on road diets, see www.walkable.org/download/rdiets.pdf