They Transformed a Nasty Stroad With BRT

bus rpid transit is cool let me clarify that actual bus rpid transit that's welld designed runs frequently and gets you to all the places you want to go is cool especially when it's leveraged to transform one of this country's most famous strods so today I'm going to tell you all about what might be the best designed brt system in the US Albuquerque rapid transit or art and I'll answer plenty of questions along the way all the things the city is getting right with art a few things that aren't quite there yet what became of Route 66 the mystery of why I've been living in Albuquerque for over a year now I'll get to all of it coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewer suggested topics always welcome and this is one I'm really doing in coordination with strong towns ABQ including an in-person Q&A event on Wednesday May 22nd and I'll talk more about all that later in the video so I've been a little hesitant to make cont about aluer because I've met so many people here who have so much more history with this Corridor and with the city but I'm going to go ahead and do my usual thing where I give you my personal point of view as someone with the better part of a couple decades experience in planning and Engineering which has included planning and design on brt projects also I'm a bit concerned that the fact that I haven't yet made a video about this city sends the message that I'm not proud to live here which is about as far from the truth as it possibly could be in fact the locals might not want me to say this but it's my humble opinion that Albuquerque is extremely slept on I found it very doable and pleasant to live here without a car the weather is fantastic the people are super cool and greenh hatch chilies are amazing and should be part of every meal so just fair warning if you're the type of person who thinks a quote unquote real urbanist could only live in like New York or DC or Chicago or Philly or the Bay Area or like Amsterdam then I think we just have a fundamental disagreement about what urbanism is all about and what this channel is trying to do for example I like a city that has good bones and is trending in a good direction and for me Albuquerque is that because Route 66 which is synonymous with car Centric Street design used to look like this and since the street was reconfigured for brt it's just a more walkable people friendly place I actually hadn't been to this City prior to the construction of art but I'm pretty sure I would not have chose to move here without all the positive changes that came with it I honestly only became aware of art at the beginning of my channel in late 2021 when I was researching a video on brt and found out that art was the only system in the US that had been awarded a gold rating for system Design By The Institute for transportation and development policy so let's talk about what that means and what brt actually is the itdp publishes a report called the brt standard which actually has a brand new 2024 update the document lays out all the elements and scoring criteria that they use to determine whether a particular service is true brt rather than just an above average bus and whether the service is worthy of the gold silver bronze or basic designation and I'm going to show examples from art as we go through these the first five elements are what they call Basics you really have to have these to be considered brt at all one dedicated right away this one is huge because if your buses are getting stuck in mixed traffic they're going to fall out of schedule adherence there's going to be bus bunching in you're going to fall well short of mimicking the characteristics of urban rail which is kind of the ideal and the scoring system gives you bonus points for physical separation and color differentiation two busway alignment and this has some Nuance to it but mostly you're getting full credit for a median aligned busway and none for a curb running busway the idea here is that without central running you get all kinds of conflicts in the right lane where buses usually are right turns onto side streets or driveways parking Maneuvers loading and unloading and all those things impact reliability three offboard Fair payment which significantly reduces dwell times because the driver doesn't have to collect fairs and passengers can board at all doors art was originally designed to have offboard Fair payment but the machines on the platforms are all covered up now since the entire system went Fairless after the pandemic for intersection treatments which is about signal priority and restricting turns across the busway and this is all evident in the signal Mast arms along Central Avenue the old Route 66 the bus has its own specialized signal head on the left and if there are left turns or U-turn turns allowed that signal head is to the right and cars don't turn across the busway until they get a solid Green Arrow AKA a protected left and five platform level boarding also important for reducing dwell times and increasing reliability the idea here is people with Mobility devices or strollers or any other passenger that might have issues with stairs is going to be able to roll right on just like you would with a train you get credit for having no vertical Gap and minimal horizontal Gap other important elements among the basics service characteristics like frequency or how often the bus runs and span or how early and how late the service goes and I'll talk about this later in the video stations you get points for good spacing which is generally considered to be 2/10 to half a mile Communications branding and passenger infos so the service is easily legible in the urban environment and you've got realtime information on the platforms no bonus points unfortunately for additional cultural interpretive programming and this is a huge one I'll talk about throughout the video pedestrian access and safety is there direct access to the platforms and does the corridor itself have frequent well-designed Crossings in builtup areas something the brt standard doesn't touch on is adjacent land use or Transit oriented development and that's fine but I am going to talk about that as we go through so brt is not a one- siiz fits-all solution for every city for a lot of denser busier corridors and urban content texts it's just not going to be enough capacity but for a lot of contexts it's a really good investment relative to the ridership potential you have on a corridor it mimics a lot of the features of rail but for a fraction of the cost and a much shorter implementation timeline and the one thing I can't emphasize enough about art and the gold rating it achieve is how very difficult it is to get a great service all the way to implementation without all of the important features being Stripped Away by people who are worried about traffic or parking or really just change of any kind trust me I consulted on several projects that were originally envisioned as true brt at the outset and by the time they got to design they were just curb running articulated buses with nice stations still an improvement but seriously compromised well Albuquerque didn't really compromise on Art and I still can't quite fathom how they got it done politically but it opened strong at the very end of 2019 and then the pandemic hit and ridership suffered as it did with every Transit service in the US but in August of last year it set a new monthly ridership record and it's been going strong ever since in that month it was the fifth highest ridership brt system in the country the four Metro areas above it are all like 5 to 20 times as large and it does significantly better numbers than several larger Metro areas that have better known brt Systems Eugene Oregon's Emerald Express is a really interesting success story and maybe I'll talk about that in a future video okay let's talk about the network there are two lines red and green which originate at uner Transit Center on the city's West Side share a single Corridor aligned on Central Avenue then split at Louisiana Boulevard with the red line going north to the Uptown district and the green line continuing East on Central Avenue service frequencies vary by time of day and by weekday and weekend but most of the time each line runs every 24 minutes so from uner Transit Center all the way to Louisiana about 10 Mi East you get buses every 12 minutes which is pretty solid for a metro area a little under a million population I'm going to hit the outer parts of this network very briefly because I really want to focus on the core segment so there's a whole series of stations on Central Avenue between uner Transit Center and the bridge over the Rio Grand River which takes you into the Central City remember this is Route 66 or what I like to call the stro father and I biked it to get a lot of this footage which maybe wasn't advisable for a self-employed YouTuber with questionable health insurance coverage but it did feel like the best way to give you a sense of what the street environment is like this segment has dedicated bus lanes for nearly the whole length and centr aligned stations let's jump to the Eastern extension of the green line and here I have to clarify the itdp only requires that a certain portion of the system have all the brt elements at least 3 miles well Albuquerque has about 10 Mi of gold level infrastructure but not the green line east of Louisiana you know I wondered as I was making this video where's the Blue Line don't you always start with a blue line but this is New Mexico so you really do have to go red and green anyway the treatment out here is significantly different the art is curb running in mixed traffic and the cross-section of Central Avenue is is pretty horrific I want to be clear that this part of the city is definitely lower income and I understand the non cical operational reasons you might not spend as much on this part of central but it is a weird look and there have been some pedestrian Crossing improvements here but pretty minimal compared to some other parts of the corridor that we'll get to later in the video and granted there aren't quite as many big trip attractors out here but I guess it just depends what kind of cultural institutions you're into let's go the other branch of the art Network the Red Line North to Uptown this one also turns into a curb running alignment in mixed traffic on Louisiana and I just have to take a moment to point out this beautiful crosssection which is four General travel Lanes in each Direction why you need anything like this in a metro area under a million I just can't even comprehend so Uptown is complicated this is a bit of a simplification but at a certain point in the city's history a lot of the kinds of businesses that really belong downtown started moving to this area instead and we'll get to downtown Albuquerque's challenges and charm in a minute but let's acknowledge that if you want to visit just about any kind of major national retailer you're going to have to come uptown there's a whole Lifestyle Center here and if you need say some upscale home furnishings or a wireless mouse that has the charging port on the bottom this is where you have to come or if you want find D establishments uptown's the place for that too including one that really justifies bus Rapid Transit service all by itself this is also where you go to see movies since the multiplex downtown apparently didn't survive the pandemic and of all places in the city this is actually where you see the most dense development under construction you just wish it was on the part of the art Corridor that gets 12 minute frequencies instead of 24 okay that was Uptown so let's contrast downtown the art alignment is a little different through the downtown core it doesn't run on Central but on a couple at one block off so westbound on copper Avenue a block North of Central and eastbound on gold Avenue a block South with a major stop at the Alvarado Transportation Center where you can connect to all kinds of other Transit routes as well as inter city buses the Amtrak Southwest Chief and The Rail Runner which runs up to Santa Fe 10 times a day on weekdays Central Avenue downtown is a bit of a mixed bag it's definitely got the bones of a great downtown Main Street but there are a lot of nightclubs and I'm not anti night club it's just that these are storefronts that are mostly dead during the daytime hour so doesn't contribute to a vibrant Street environment but there are bright spots too apartments and a food Hall where a department store used to be other interesting Renovations underway an old Firestone Tire Center that's being rehabbed by exnovo a brewery I actually used to frequent when they were in North Portland but all the cool Portland people are moving to Albuquerque obviously downtown has actually grown on me since I moved here once you get a couple blocks off Central there's newer housing and the people who live here in frequent the coffee shops and bars just seem I don't know a little more hip I myself am not hip whatsoever but I kind of enjoy being around people who are West of downtown you get one of these single Lane bus ways on Central which are signal controlled at either end of the segment to prevent conflicts which kind of limits the capacity of the busway but old Route 66 is definitely constrained through this section as far as land use some density is starting to show up but still a decent amount of Legacy Route 66 architecture and I won't talk about Oldtown Albuquerque too much here although it is historic and kind of cool but similar mix of some new density and historic Route 66 design features there's one more stop before you cross the Rio Grand into the western part of the city and the bridge does get congested at certain times of day so when you're biking you're either kind of zipping by traffic or at least keeping pace which is pretty sweet until you get to the end of the bridge and the bike lane just kind of vanishes I think they want you to merge into General traffic but I'm not doing that really though the segment where there's the most action and the most potential is Central Avenue to the east of downtown all the way through Knob Hill a couple miles out the East downtown or EO platform was actually closed at the time of filming but it's a cool district with a bit of density Some solid storefront retail architecture and some pretty good dining options also interesting street cross-section with a single Lane protected busway Presbyterian station kind of dull but a medical center of this size is a pretty solid trip generator probably the most notable thing about this location the massive vacant Lots right on Central that have been sitting follow since the first time I visited in late 20122 I know this has to be slated for dense housing but no one's pulled the trigger on construction yet a little disheartening although when I was out filming it looked like maybe they were drilling core samples so that would be a good sign and this really gets to the challeng as Albuquerque has with art and with Central Avenue as much success as there's been with ridership number and as many good things as are happening it could all be so so much better if there were just a lot more people living along the corridor itself so I'm going to talk more about that but first quick reminder to click on all the usual stuff subscribe if you're enjoying this brief tour of urbanism in the land of enchantment lots of ways to connect on the various apps and for a very very limited time a chance to connect in person because I'm doing a special event in Albuquerque to talk about this video and honestly whatever else people want to talk about this is going to be Wednesday May 22nd and it's going to be a moderated Q&A where you can submit questions in advance but I'll definitely hang out and chat with folks and like all the other events I've done it's a great opportunity to meet lots of like-minded people in your own City strong Town's ABQ is putting this on and I will talk a bit more about that organization later in the video and it's going to be a fusion a multiv venue arts and entertainment campus right on the future rail trail downtown if you haven't been to Fusion yet very cool place and note that they do have free parking but I'm going to be severely disappointed if we don't overwhelm their bike parking capacity or just take the art anyway space is limited and the RSVP link is down in the description okay I want to set the stage for this last piece by laying out some harsh truths about housing Supply and affordability in Albuquerque and I'll do this as I run some footage of Silver Street which is a great low stress bike Boulevard that runs parallel to Central Avenue through this last segment I want to talk about because I moved to this city in part because I wanted to be in the western us for reasons and I wanted to be in an actual City and I wanted to just to make YouTube videos which isn't the world's most financially stable profession I'm afraid so I had to have an affordable City and the vend diagram of all those things basically leads you to Albuquerque New Mexico well in the western US housing that's quote unquote affordable is pretty relative and what I found when I got here was that it wasn't that easy to find a place that was in my budget and that was in a location that was walkable to a lot of the kinds of places I like to go and had good access to the spine of the art system the city acknowledges all this in its housing forward ABQ initiative which has been looking at new strategies to fill their housing shortage which it estimates at around3 ,000 units currently one strategy that hasn't yet been included in housing forward ABQ is duplexes in R1 or would have traditionally been single family residential zones but there is currently a proposed amendment to the city's integrated development ordinance and it includes language that would make duplexes a permitted use in R1 zoned areas within a quarter mile of urban centers and premium Transit corridors essentially areas around the art alignment but I'll leave links in the description so you can read the fine print for yourself keep in mind R1 zoning makes up around half the total land area of the city and there's a decent amount of it pretty close into the central Corridor is permitting duplexes going to solve the city's housing shortage well no one thing is going to do that building four-story apartment buildings on The Limited number of opportunity sites right on Central is also not going to do that the point is you need a lot of different tools in the toolbx and if you can't even get duplexes in R1 zones it's hard to be optimistic about ever closing the housing Supply Gap anyway the first city council meeting to hear the Ido amendment is on Monday June 3rd strongtown ABQ is doing a great job of rallying support for the amendment so I encourage you to learn more again links down the description and at the strongtown site and showing up in person to testify is extremely powerful okay let's look at the actual stationary in these neighborhoods where I just had an impossible time trying to find a reasonably priced rental unit UNM Pope joy and yeah the University of New Mexico is here and that is a massive trip generator both in terms of students and employment the brick light district is on the south side of central across from UNM and I do frequent the places here a lot because it is extremely accessible by transit and by bike but there's still a ton of surface parking right on Central and this is University property so I get that that makes it difficult but it's hard to see this as anything but a prime spot for Transit oriented development Next Stop East Knob Hill also extremely accessible by bike and by transit and my understanding is as part of the art project they not only invested in improvements to The Pedestrian realm on the sidewalks themselves but increased the number of signalized pedestrian Crossings which is a huge deal a study from the University of New Mexico found that serious injury and fatalities along Central dropped by 60% in the first year of the art project and keep in mind most cities saw Surge and pedestrian injuries and fatalities during the worst part of the pandemic lots of businesses here that I enjoy frequenting maybe a little too much to be honest and definitely structures that are ripe for some kind of Redevelopment or another and also some creative use of older Route 66 type architecture here and some new infill as well but there just needs to be more all up and down the central Corridor and within walking distance anecdotally a lot of the reason you hear people say they don't use art is because you see unhoused people on there or often just lowincome people they're just people but the city did spend $34 million on services for the unhoused in 2022 so it is a problem but a lot of the problem is people can't even reach the first rung on the housing ladder so just to be clear I I think we should be encouraging more housing Supply in locations that are close to shopping services employment opportunities and great Transit access places where people don't have to spend as much of their money or time on car ownership it's a pretty simple concept that's Evergreen for basically every city that's facing a housing Supply crisis right now okay one last anecdote about art a couple weeks ago I went out to dinner in Knob Hill on a Sunday and I took art instead of biking for whatever reason but when dinner was wrapping up I was mortified to learn that on Sundays art stops running at 7:30 p.m. look I think it's kind of cool that Albuquerque has a Fairless transit system but I would gladly pay a couple bucks to have a bus that runs after 7:30 anyway one last plug to get involved the city hired a consultant team to look at improvements to the bus Network and the team includes Jarrett Walker's firm so I'm optimistic so that's another effort worth paying attention to so I've included that link down in the description as well oh man that was a lot but that is all I got thanks for joining thanks to the patrons as always their direct support really makes all this work Banos I hope to see a lot of you out at Fusion on May 22nd because apparently there's a lot to talk about as always keep the great topic suggestions coming I'll be back with a new episode next week and I'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 129,801

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, urban talk, urbanism sociology, urban exploration, urbanism as a way of life, urbanism architecture, urbanist exploring cities, urbanist session, urban planning problems, urban planning, city planning, urban design, cities, cities skylines, urban planning career, urban planning degree, urban planning 101, strong towns

Id: qyOHoYqsj4k

Length: 23min 28sec (1408 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2024