These BRT proposals always start out full of promise, and then the politicians start to add water to the soup. By the time we get served, it's a thin gruel consisting mostly of transit signal priority -- which I'm sure we can all support. -- and a lot of paint.

And what else? Those terra cotta colored lanes. Isn't that where I ride my bike on 42nd St, where there are no bike lanes? Then still I have to avoid cars and vans camped out in the terra cotta lane.

For this video they were able to find some fit riders to show boarding the bus. No one really, really fat, or arthritic, or struggling with a baby carriage, a brood of brats, or a shopping cart. These buses, unlike modern trams, ride well above the pavement. So STEP up, please. If everyone wants to just walk on board, they'll need to make it rail to fix the car at the right height and distance every time.

Oh, and a young woman mentioned that these buses are clean. That certainly does make them special. The fancy paint job, less so.

If you really want to tell the world that this is something special, you'll need rail again. The sleek, Euro-style, low-floor trams going into service in dozens of cities around the world look positively FUTURISTIC -- to use a word dating me to the middle of the past century. They make a statement.

Well, it's hard to oppose anything that could improve bus service in this city. Except that I do oppose settling for second rate when we could do so much better.

It's more of a step in the right direction. Right now BRT has momentum. I say go with it, and try to make these buses as subway-like as possible, and hype that fact. The next logical step would be "well, why don't we just put rails down". I don't see BRT as a final choice... just the best choice right now for more positive change in the future.

The only real light rail expansion into NYC I've heard of is an expansion of the Hudson Bergen light rail into Staten Island. Meaning, the expansion of an existing system. We can look at a street with meager bus service and have the foresight to see how much better it would be with light rail, but it's just too much of a leap in thought for lots of people. I think there's a tendency to just brush off something like light rail now as too big or too different to even seriously consider.

Also, Cap, while I've never lived in a city where there is such a stigma against buses, there definitely is a bias here! I think it helps to create a "new class" of buses, rather than just view it all as bus improvements. Anecdotally, having the SBS route in place on the BX12 has definitely increased my propensity to ride it. While the travel time improved vs the BX12 limited, it didn't improve by that much IMO. The fact that it is a new kind of bus service changed its perception more for me than the improvement in travel time.

Please, just give us the bus improvements already and stop bullshitting.

I think you're presenting a false choice between very expensive subway construction and ad-hoc bus networks. Realistically though light rail or streetcars provide more capacity and the cost is somewhere in-between. Current subway construction is more expensive because the MTA collected bids during an unsual period when construction costs increased dramatically. I'm sure there are other issues involved but plenty of places seem to be able to build subways for costs that don't get near the SAS.

However, I do agree that using the visual language of heavy rail on maps will do a lot to make people feel like SBS is not a secondary form of mass transit.

I've never really understood why there isn't a greater desire to build surface rapid transit in NYC. It would really change tons of neighborhoods. Imagine a waterfront line from Bay Ridge, to Redhook and Greenpoint. those neighborhoods are undeserved by transit and already experiencing tons of new residents and development.

If anything, I'd take it a step further. I'd like to see SBS routes on the subway maps, perhaps even with traditional subway number/lettering. There are so many people out there living in subway dependent neighborhoods who don't consider buses a viable alternative (honestly, I'm glad my middle/high school days of depending exclusively on them are over). This could only encourage bus usage by the subway set IMHO.

More like this please:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8594149@N06/524053366/in/set-72157600305927405/

Dan