http://www.leparisien.fr/home/info/vivremieux/articles/A-PARIS-LE-PIEGE-DES-COULOIRS-DE-BUS-INTERDITS_298491735

It looks like the shared bus/bike lanes contributed to the problem. Or rather, the fact that it's not well-marked when cyclists are not allowed in a shared lane, as in this lane, because it's too narrow for a bus to pass a cyclist.

Why not just close all the major crosstown thoroughfares to cabs, cars, etc? Only BRT, pedestrians and bicycles.

Dedicate 2,500 police to traffic enforcement; the increased fines could pay for the extra police and fund transit. Vote on my poll!

http://bettertransitny.blogspot.com

Fact is (and I know you know this), it's simply impossible to build sufficient road capacity for individual cars. Thus we must maximize what capacity we do have. This means using roads to move buses full of people, not cars with one person each. And as most people traversing 34th are neither in car nor bus, but are on foot, it's desirable to widen sidewalks to increase pedestrian capacity as well.

The "morons," my friend, are drivers in SUVs gridlocked on 34th: wasting time, blocking the street for buses and emergency vehicles, enriching the pockets of Middle Eastern dictators with each gallon of burned gasoline, and degrading the city's air and the planet's atmosphere.

In an ideal world this is a great idea and would be great for the businesses on that stretch between 5th and 6th avenues. In reality this would be disastrous to commuters and businesses a like any where else. The city would be fooling itself if they think they can pull this off without suffering major consequences.

Likewise, these creative, innovative street designs and physically-separated lanes were not a part of the project. In fact, it was the opposite. The MTA bus people were complaining that Weinshall's traffic engineers were reluctant to make the street design changes necessary to really make BRT work. I take that with a grain of salt since one of the easiest things in the world to do is to get MTA to talk smack about DOT and vice versa.

The more significant take-away is that prior to JSK there was no real sense of partnership and collaboration between Iris and whomever the Howard Roberts counterpart was back then.

I'm sure some of the old BRT plans can be found here on Streetsblog and you can see for yourself: JSK and her people have vastly improved these plans. I think her admin deserves a ton of credit.

Primeggia is no longer such a big problem now that he's not running the agency, now that he has an actual boss who makes decisions rather than deferring everything to him.

As far as bikes go, don't worry about restricting bikes from the transitway. It won't work. Bicyclists use one-way streets the wrong way. They use bus lanes, they use anything that's not an expressway. This is a good thing. Do you honestly think that a messenger wouldn't use this transitway to make deliveries or to simply cross town? And if they do it, anyone can do it, really. Might as well accomodate them (us), with sufficiently wide lanes. It works in Paris, VERY well.

When speaking of connecting the green modes, let's not make the mistake of inferring that the airports represent green transportation. They are least green, next to cruise ships.

And please, please pinch me. I love you, JSK!

The air train was over a Billion dollars when built and would be twice that today. So as far as exponents, the BRT service will be the exponentially greater service and further airport connections are a lot of dollars chasing very few asses in the seat.

As for the dual bus lanes on 5th and Madison. it's a great idea, I just wish they'd extend them north of 59th. won't there be a bottleneck at 59th when two lanes worth of rush hour bus traffic have to merge into one?

Exactly, you're so on point.

The genius of the 34th/42nd loop is it provides efficient cross-town transit for each main transit node in Midtown. This leverages all existing transit infrastructure for maximum efficiency.

The Vision42 study also shows that real estate along the 42nd corridor would appreciate $1 billion in value. That's tax revenue that could be plowed back into further street improvements.

That plan used a light rail loop or streetcar system, but no reason you couldn't do the same with buses, and possibly upgrade to rail one day if merited.

Phase 3: replace the buses with sleek, low-floor electric light rail and eliminate cars across the entire 34th st corridor.

Phase 4: do the same thing on 42nd.

Phase 5: connect the trams on 34th & 42nd in a loop.

This has been studied: check it out at http://www.vision42.org