Bus lanes on Mission Street have proven remarkably successful at speeding up transit service. San Francisco can and should do more.
San Francisco’s public transit mostly runs on street surfaces. BART and the Muni Metro tunnels only cover a small portion of the city; a large majority of transit riders have to ride the bus or the surface Muni Metro streetcars, where a jam-packed Muni routinely gets stuck behind a car with one driver. In the last few years, Muni has tried to save some of its buses from private car traffic by giving them dedicated lanes, whether it's the Geary BRT project or the cheaper red carpet lanes on Mission. Well, with data coming in from the implementation of the red lanes, the verdict is clear: high-quality bus lanes are essential to good urban transit operations, and Muni should aim to extend this program to every bus trunk in the city.
So far buses have been sped up by two minutes each way, and when the program is complete, Muni expects the saving to rise to five minutes. While five minutes may not seem like much, the total scheduled travel time along the segment that Muni is upgrading, the 2.5-mile stretch between 11th Street and Randall Street, is 20 minutes on local buses and 16 minutes on rapid buses. The two minutes of saved travel time represent about 10% of current trip time, and the projected five-minute saving is a quarter of the total travel time.
And if there is one place that needs faster bus travel, it's Mission Street. The 14 Mission is the second busiest bus route in the city, behind only the 38 Geary—and when combined with the 49, which runs on the segment of Mission that Muni is upgrading before branching off to Van Ness, it's ahead of Geary. Traffic backs up quickly on this commercial artery; even with the recent improvements, the local 14 bus crawls at 7 miles an hour on this stretch, slower than the city average of 7.4 miles per hour.
The red lanes are the most visible aspect of the program to speed up city buses, but there are several more. Some intersections ban left turns, while others force right turns. Jamison Wieser, former member of the SFMTA advisory council, explains that the goal of the forced right turns is to encourage through-traffic to use South Van Ness instead of Mission, reducing the amount of car traffic. The result has been noticeable and positive: there is less traffic, and as a result, Muni talks up not just the bus speed improvements but also traffic calming, which has led to fewer car crashes. Moreover, with less traffic and more room to maneuver using the red lanes and bus bulbs, the buses are arriving more regularly, without the bunching that inevitably affects every bus route.
That Muni is sending through-traffic elsewhere may explain why, according to Mission Local, the merchants are unhappy—they view the new street design as hostile to their clientele. However, Streetsblog reports that urban merchants generally overestimate the share of customers who arrive by car, giving examples from Vancouver and New York. The merchants themselves tend to drive to work and then assume everyone acts like them, but in reality, where transit is available shoppers and diners use it rather than driving in.
Another aspect of the red lane program is stop consolidation. The local buses used to stop practically on every block, about eight stops per mile. This is horribly inefficient. On such a busy corridor, buses would make all of these stops, since there would be passengers waiting at every block, or passengers appearing to wait while standing outside a shop.
To speed up the buses, Muni removed seven stops and added one to space the remaining stops more evenly. Judging by the difference in travel time between local and limited buses, each removed stop saves the bus about twenty to thirty seconds, which adds up quickly over a long stretch.
As Muni completes the program, the city will soon see additional reduction in travel time along Mission. Because of compromises on car versus transit priority, most of the route will only be red in one direction, southbound; moreover, the most congested area, at Van Ness, is not painted red at all yet, but will be shortly.
The most remarkable thing is that there were bus lanes on Mission even before they were painted red. Drivers just ignored them, but they were better than nothing. The time saving from the red lanes is on top of the time saving from having the old bus lanes—and that's with dedicated lanes in only one direction along most of the street.
Muni is slowly rolling out red lanes on more and more streets. So far, this program seems like an unmitigated success. If the same travel time improvements seen in the Mission happen citywide, the average speed of a Muni bus could rise to 10 or 11 miles per hour.
Finally, a bus with 50 passengers hanging on to the poles and straps would get something like 50 times the priority of a car with one driver. City residents who travel to areas not served by BART or by the Muni Metro tunnel would be able to count on buses being there; people who can afford Uber or Lyft might choose to stay on the cheaper bus nonetheless, and people who cannot might still choose to make more trips by bus, creating a virtuous cycle of more ridership and more service.
What seems like a small improvement in speed for one bus is actually a harbinger of major transformational progress.
Alon Levy is a mathematician with a strong interest in urbanism and mass transit, and currently works as a freelance writer. He contributes to the Bay City Beacon as a weekly transit columnist for Pedestrian Observations. You can find more of his writing supporting walkability and good transit.
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