CONVERSATION
They say the only constant is change, but I’m pretty sure whoever came up with that wasn’t thinking about San Francisco. Look at Geary Boulevard, which has been awaiting faster bus service for 20 years.
Before COVID, the 38 Geary was Muni’s busiest line, moving more than 50,000 riders a day along the congested thoroughfare. To better serve them, the city’s transportation agencies sought to do bus rapid transit, or BRT, with dedicated lanes to speed trips across town — separating buses from autos, double-parkers, right-turners, livery vehicles, the whole knot of traffic. It seems pretty straightforward; the project pencils a lot cheaper than digging out a subway, and can be implemented in stages.
Transit watchers and advocates have been tilting at bus rapid transit for two decades now. (Also quixotic but more Ahab-like have been BRT’s haters, so many haters, not to mention your workaday obstructionists.) The Frisc’s early posts have agonized over the lethargy of the project’s process, hoping that at some hoary point there would be enough momentum to carry it to fruition, and all this dysfunctional history would be forgotten.
As SF’s planning and approvals process plodded along, ambitions were scaled back. By 2017 the design called for center lanes in just part of Geary, between Arguello Street and 28th Avenue. Now it’s clear even that truncated portion with full-fledged BRT is not going to happen.
So the buses are slated to run in the curbside lanes in the Richmond district, similar to the improvements being worked on over the rest of the corridor, from Market Street downtown to Stanyan Street. It’ll look more like the painted red lanes on Mission Street instead of what’s being built on Van Ness, according to SF Weekly, which first reported the change that was supposed to come wasn’t coming.
As part of the five stages of grief, I checked in with the SFMTA’s major corridors planning manager Liz Brisson, who is overseeing the Geary improvement project. For the record, she was in high school when this entire BRT saga began. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Frisc: So this change from center lane to side lane, given the project’s history, this feels like more than just a change — it feels like a capitulation. Why is this happening?
Liz Brisson: It is really about what makes the most sense in this moment. A couple different things are at play: One is that the first phase of the BRT project [Geary from Market to Stanyan] has been under construction since 2019, and is an installation of side-running lanes, as well as additional transit and safety improvements. And we have found that the improvements have done a lot to improve reliability. Just our initial installation of transit lanes and bus stop changes at the end of 2018 was giving us up to 20 percent improvement in travel time.
Second is in response to the COVID pandemic, we installed emergency transit lanes on several of our most important corridors, including on segments of Geary in the Richmond. That was a quick build installation of what we could do in-house with our shops, a side-running transit lane installation, and that has worked well.
Those two factors cause us to think this is actually a good time to just kind of move in the direction of building out what we started with the emergency transit lanes. I don’t really think it’s a capitulation, because you know, we already won all the lawsuits and everything. It’s not like there’s a reason we have to do it; it is just what makes most sense for the agency and for transit, frankly.
If it’s going to take more than 20 years to meet and plan and study and do outreach and reports and then not follow through, why should the process be trusted? What have we learned here?
There’s a type of transit improvement we have honed and mastered in the last several years, and based on the success we’ve had with small-scale capital improvements, what we’ve learned is that this is actually a great way to improve the entire system. Prior to the pandemic, ridership on the Muni rapid network was up, and I’d have to double-check the percentage, but it was up something like 20 percent, when across the country transit ridership was way down. I think that’s because riders don’t ride a mile of the system; it’s the network, and they need the whole network to be better. If you can do a little bit all over the network to improve it, you end up with huge dividends.
One of the nice things about side-running lanes is you can start with what you can do with paint. The benefits start accruing as soon as the project gets approved, because it’s very fast and effective to be able to just use roadway striping and signage to start carving out the changes, shoring up with capital improvements as well.
Pursuing side-running lanes is the fastest way to further improvements for the line. As soon as we can get the needed approvals at the SFMTA board and the SFCTA board, we would be able to implement the rest of the transit lanes as soon as sometime next year.
The essence of BRT is separating the bus from road traffic — you don’t worry about right-turners, about parkers. But we’re not calling this BRT, right? What are we calling this?
I don’t know that the name matters so much. We’re planning to call this the second phase of the project the Geary Boulevard Improvement Project, and it’s primarily about improving transit and safety. In the Geary Bus Rapid Transit environmental document there were several alternatives that could become the chosen alternative for the project, and one of them was a side-running alternative. So it is still consistent with the overall vision of what was established during that phase of work.
You are correct, that side-running lane is still a lane that people who are driving would access for parking or to make right turns. Obviously, it’s not going to protect transit from everything the way a center-running median would, but generally we’ve found pretty good compliance — particularly when we color the lanes red, we’ve found that compliance goes up quite a bit and that overall transit travel time and reliability improves. It’s still a big change from existing conditions where it’s just general-purpose travel lanes. It gives buses a lot more priority than they have today.
There are trade-offs, and the trade-offs are you need special signal phases to transition the bus from the side to the center — there’s some delays and potential for lack of reliability associated with those transition points. [Editor’s note: In the previous “hybrid” design, buses would have had to switch from center lanes to side lanes, or vice versa, near Arguello.] There’s also the fact that the local and rapid service would need to be consolidated, so some of the savings you get from the center lane you end up losing by having the bus stop more frequently. If you look at the environmental analysis for transit, travel time, and reliability, there’s really not that much of a difference between the center and side alternatives.
There have been more than 250 meetings with more than 60 stakeholder groups. Where are we now?
We’re anticipating two rounds of outreach, one in a few months. Let me be clear: Regardless of whether we’re switching from center to side running, we would still want to do two rounds of outreach, because we need to go from a very high-level design, a conceptual level that was done for the EIR [environmental impact report] to the more detailed level of showing all the curb space changes.
The first round would be focused on getting input on the design, as well as talking more about why we’re proposing to move from center to side. For the second round, we’d show a detailed design of the corridor and seek feedback on any sort of final tweaks before we then take it to our board. Ideally we would be making our approvals sometime early in 2022, and being able to install the transit lanes and bus stop changes sometime next year.
Has there been any kind of fatigue in the community, given the length of time and the process?
We haven’t done a lot of outreach about it yet. We have discussed it with the Geary Community Advisory Committee, and there was strong support and no concerns raised by that group. So we’re not hearing a lot of concern at this point. But it’s not been a message that’s been out there or broadcast that long as of yet.
Follow Anthony Lazarus on Twitter: @Sr_Lazarus