Jeff Swenerton: Geary Tansit Improvements

As the busiest bus corridor in the city, Geary Street is scheduled for a makeover that could dramatically increase bus reliability and speed through several inexpensive fixes. Under the program, known as Transit Preferential Streets (TPS), a set of guidelines formally adopted into the City's General Plan in 1995, transit is given a "preference" over cars. In a city that has the second-highest residential density in the country, with most residents a five-minute walk from a transit line, TPS is a crucial means for making transit a faster, cheaper and more reliable alternative to cars.

This year, Muni is planning many changes to Geary's transit, intended to increase the average bus speed and improve reliability for the entire route, including helping buses avoid bunching together at stops. Together, these improvements could reduce travel time downtown by 10 to 16 percent, while only costing $500,000 ­ an extremely low figure, about the cost of a single bus.

This low-cost approach to improving transit reliability by implementing inexpensive but effective fixes to the most serious bottlenecks, is an innovative way to address the biggest reason people choose transit over cars: reliability.

"Improving transit operation along the Geary corridor has been always a high priority for us because it is such a heavily-used route," said Javad Mirabdal, a transportation planner at the SF Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT). "The proposed changes along Inner Geary and O'Farrell streets are simple and inexpensive measures."

On an average weekday, the Geary corridor (which includes O'Farrell eastbound) carries more than 50,000 transit riders. But even with buses stopping every two and a half minutes during peak periods, it is still highly congested. The average speed of local buses downtown is 5.8 miles per hour, slower during peak hours. Riders complain about the ride being bumpy and crowded.

After studying traffic patterns along Geary, officials at Muni and DPT discovered that the most congested length, from Van Ness Avenue to Market Street, known as "Inner Geary," could be optimized for transit in a series of improvements that could be completed by the end of 2004 and speed up the entire route.

Some of these improvements are being implemented now. Along Outer Geary Boulevard, from 33rd Avenue to Baker Street, an infrared-based transit priority signal system is being installed that senses buses approaching intersections and either holds the green light for them to pass through or begins the countdown before they arrive.

Muni rider surveys show that reliability is the most important factor of service quality. Reliability is severely affected by many small delays ­ such as squeezing between delivery trucks or jockeying for a space on the curb to take on passengers.

"Those delays impact speed but, more importantly, foul the reliability of the buses, an even bigger problem on Inner Geary because it acts to take buses off schedule over the entire route," said Jay Primus, a special projects assistant at Muni.

Along Inner Geary, where major bottlenecks occur, the changes will focus on keeping buses on schedule- ­ widening and restriping the transit-only lanes, reducing "dwell time" by eliminating five stops along Geary and O'Farrell (currently the buses stop nearly every block), and introducing right-turn pockets that allow turning cars to get out of the way of buses in the transit-only lane.

Another part of the plan is to combat double parking in two ways: by facilitating deliveries to downtown businesses with longer and better-located yellow zones and increasing enforcement of parking violations by creating a Geary transit-corridor "beat."

Bus bulbs are being proposed for the busiest intersections, such as Geary at Van Ness Avenue, Geary at Kearny Street and O'Farrell and Powell Street. First experimented with by Muni in the early 1970s, bulbs that jut out to take on passengers have become a standard component of "traffic calming," where transportation planners can manipulate the flow of traffic by narrowing lanes, widening sidewalks, planting landscaped medians and installing bulbs ­ all of which cause drivers to slow down. Bulbs also help passengers by not forcing the buses to move to the curb. The planned bulbs also widen the sidewalks, allowing for more pedestrian space around the stops.

If these improvements are approved by the SF Board of Supervisors before summer, they are scheduled to be implemented by the end of the year and will pave the way for more significant upgrades by 2009 ­ a crucial step toward making Geary a true transit corridor.

Jeff Swenerton is the communications manager of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, a membership-based nonprofit organization committed to improving San Francisco's housing, transit, urban design, regional planning and environmental sustainability through research, education and advocacy.