Sue Lani Madsen: Debate over STA tax should focus on usefulness, not trendiness
Based on cost per mile, the Central City Line was a lightning rod for criticism the first time STA ran the tax measure, and it will be again even though the tax rate is lower.
The Central City Line is touted as a Bus Rapid Transit route. To understand what BRT is, I followed its roots to Brazil and the work of architect Jaime Lerner.
What does a Brazilian architect have to do with Spokane’s Central City Line? Lerner invented Bus Rapid Transit. After reading Lerner’s vision, all I can say is “Central City Line, you’re not Bus Rapid Transit.” It lacks fancy boarding platforms, dedicated lanes and traffic signal priority. But it still has merit as part of a regional network.
Jaime Lerner served as mayor of his hometown of Curitiba for three terms. Curitiba was similar in size to Spokane until rapid growth in the 1960s pushed it past the million mark in less than 20 years. An urban planning rule of thumb teaches that any metro area with a population over a million needs a subway, but Curitiba was poor. Lerner solved the problem by focusing on meeting needs with available resources.
It’s easy to get solutions and needs mixed up. Curitiba’s problem was not the lack of a Paris Metro system. The need was moving people. The problem was doing it with frequent service and good geographic coverage. The restraint was cost.
Lerner’s solution used buses to mimic the usability of mature systems like London’s Tube and New York’s subways. Fixed linear routes provide the spines, combined with routes connecting neighborhoods. Prepaid fares, bus-level-platform boarding, intraneighborhood subsystems of small vans and frequent scheduling make the system work. The Lonely Planet travel guide praises the convenience and the cost, about $3.30 per trip. Curitiba is now a metropolis of almost 2 million and never has needed a subway or light rail.
Success begets imitation. Installed in 1974, parts of the Curitiba system have been copied many times but rarely the whole system. Bus Rapid Transit is now a trendy phrase used by the federal Department of Transportation.
There’s a coolness factor to calling a segment like the Central City Line a BRT. After giving a bus route a highfalutin name and calling it BRT in Los Angeles, ridership dramatically increased.
Coolness and trendy don’t impress me. I grew up riding Spokane buses to grade-school band practice, visiting grandparents, to junior high and downtown with friends as a teenager. Transit meant freedom. A bus system should focus on getting people where they need to go in a reasonable time at an affordable price in both taxes and fares.
I called Karl Otterstrom, director of planning at STA, with questions. His practical explanation of the plan cleared up the fog of progressive jargon used in most of the STA materials.
The Central City Line isn’t Brazilian BRT, but it meets the federal Department of Transportation’s definition to leverage federal grant programs. STA’s 10-year plan for a high-performance transit network does away with the “all lines lead to downtown” approach. The comprehensive plan has a dozen different main corridors both north-south and east-west; the Central City Line is just one of them. Main lines will be intersected by neighborhood routes, creating a grid instead of hub and spoke. The Cheney School District, stretching across the West Plains from Airway Heights to Cheney itself, will finally be connected without a downtown trip. Frequency will match distance – 6-15 minute frequency in neighborhoods, 15-30 minute frequency for routes with long stretches of freeway travel.
The bus fleet will be a combination of diesel and electric vehicles, no more hybrids. The electric buses are more expensive to buy, but the operating payback has been improving.
Taxes aren’t automatically bad if they buy what you need at the right price. What do you need out of transit? A ride to work or school? Fewer cars in your way as you drive your own? There’s plenty of time before November to dissect the budget for value received compared to cost and to ask more questions. Plans can change.
Sue Lani Madsen can be reached at rulingpen@gmail.com or on Twitter: @SueLaniMadsen.