Genuine Bus-on-Shoulder
Bus-On-Shoulder of Highway 1
New: 11 minute video: REAL Bus-on-Shoulder for Santa Cruz County
You can take an express bus from Watsonville to Santa Cruz without traveling a whole lot longer than it takes by car—so long as you travel after the morning peak commute hours. If you hop on a 91X bus at Main St. and Green Valley Rd., you can get to Cabrillo College in 18 minutes and the County Building in Santa Cruz in 36 minutes. What if buses could be made faster than car travel during peak congestion periods? That’s exactly what happens in places like Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Atlanta, where a bus-only lane on the shoulder of the highway allows buses to make good travel time in spite of highway congestion.
In 2013, Assemblyman Mark Stone carried legislation that allows bus-on-shoulder in Santa Cruz and Monterey County. Yet the draft EIR for the Highway 1 HOV Lane Project never mentioned the concept of bus-on-shoulder. Santa Cruz Metro and Monterey-Salinas Transit funded a feasibility study of Bus-on-Shoulder that was published in 2018.
Instead of building bus-only lanes on the 11 mile stretch from Santa Cruz to Watsonville, the RTC is planning to run express buses in the 4 miles of proposed auxiliary lanes that are currently funded. The only time buses will run in bus-only lanes will be short segments at overpasses. The RTC calls their plan “bus-on-shoulder”. However, we know of no other bus-on-shoulder system in the nation that doesn’t consist of dedicated bus lane on the shoulder of the highway. We think a better name for the RTC’s plan is bus-stuck-in-auxiliary-lanes. The photo at right is a preview of the future: the 91X bus stuck in rush hour traffic on the segment of Highway 1 that already has an auxiliary lane. Here’s what the EIR said about traffic conditions following the next auxiliary lane to be built, Soquel Dr. to 41st Ave:
“In the southbound corridor in the PM peak hour…the Auxiliary Lane Alternative would slightly worsen traffic operations.”
Frequent Bus Service
The Sentinel opinion page has been full of contentious debate over the future of our rail corridor. The Santa Cruz Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) invited an internationally known transit planner to shed light on that debate. In his talk Jarrett Walker suggested that we need to be having a more immediate debate. “The debate before you is not just the exciting debate over what your infrastructure should be. You have a very immediate debate over whether you want to begin providing competitive transit service…”
Walker showed a map of the population density of our County and compared that with a map showing the frequency of bus transit service. The only transit service considered “frequent”, (at least every fifteen minutes) are the routes between UCSC and Downtown Santa Cruz. Walker remarked, “For a community of your size and your density, let alone the degree of progressive values that operate in this community, you do not have very much transit.”
Walker said that more frequent transit service would benefit travelers along the Santa Cruz – Watsonville corridor. “We know that simply a higher level of service would be useful to a lot more people and would be having a lot more benefit particularly in the Santa Cruz-Watsonville corridor and both internally to Santa Cruz and Watsonville.
The RTC needs to revive discussion of the frequent transit network. The RTC’s Unified Corridor Investment Study (UCIS) took a step in that direction by including Increased Transit Frequency on Soquel Dr./Freedom Blvd in its analysis of investment scenarios. However, the RTC staff dropped this strategy from their preferred scenario. If I’m understanding Jarrett Walker correctly, this is a mistake.
“How much of a transit system do you want? Because you clearly have less than you could use. You clearly have low hanging fruit….
It’s not about the big spectacular project that transforms everything like the BART extension [in San Jose]. It’s about fixing the bus network. Its about making the bus system incremental more useful so that more and more people find it to be expanding their liberty.”
For a community of your size and your density, let alone the degree of progressive values that operate in this community, you do not have very much transit
