Commute of the Future? The Bus

So in Chicago, a city that thinks big, a would-be Olympic host with an extensive rail transit system, its newest line just 15 years old — in Chicago, what is the latest idea for transit?

Buses.

The Chicago Transit Authority is going to try the spiffed-up kind of express service called "bus rapid transit" sometime next year. It's merely the latest American city to do so. This is good news for liberty.

What Chicago proposes is bus-only lanes on four major streets. With limited stops and on-board devices that make traffic lights turn green, the buses are expected to move more quickly than the 9 mph that regular buses achieve.

Chicago's looking to Cleveland for inspiration. There, in another city that for years has used more traditional rail transit, authorities are about to open a bus rapid transit line between downtown and the University Circle area, where the Cleveland Clinic is.

For about $200 million total, Cleveland will offer riders 63-foot-long articulated buses that feel train-like. Passengers buy tickets before they board, speeding up stops, and they'll get on or off through wide side doors at specially built stations with platforms that match the buses' floor height. Because the vehicles move in bus-only lanes and will turn traffic lights green, they should cut travel times by about 25% from what ordinary buses take.

All this for about a third the cost of putting in rail, according to the CEO of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transportation Authority, Joe Calabrese. "That was a major advantage for us," he said. The city had long thought about rail, even a subway, for the corridor, but had Cleveland tried that, it probably wouldn't have gotten the needed federal money, Mr. Calabrese says.

The new system can lure people who don't usually take buses, he says, by acting like trains. "In Cleveland, suits don't ride buses," he told a newspaper. Now they might, thanks to speed and convenience.

That's how it's worked elsewhere. Boston and Los Angeles are among the cities that have bus rapid transit; Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Charlotte are among the two dozen or so cities planning or considering it. Even New York, unique in its reliance on rail transit, is trying some elements on a route in the Bronx, though it's using regular buses and isn't shooing other traffic out of the way.

The upside to bus rapid transit is plain, says Dennis Hinebaugh of the Center for Urban Transportation Research in Tampa, Fla.: It gives rail-like service and speed at much lower cost. Cities don't have to rip up streets or relocate utilities to put in tracks. They don't have to build and staff separate rail maintenance barns. The buses cost less than rail cars.

So the idea's getting a try-out even in old-time rail towns like Chicago. Passionate advocates of rail transit (as distinct from advocates of, simply, transit) don't seem to like this much. It is one more breeze dispelling some foggy myths about trains.

Already vanishing is the notion that nothing but rail will pry Americans out of cars, should that be your aim. Four-dollar gasoline seems to do the trick nicely, and while transit ridership is up across the country, it's up not merely on trains but on regular old buses, too, and even on vanpools.

Bus rapid transit further dents this argument, that there's something magical about rail. There is, in that it's very good at making money vanish. Chicago's looking at buses rather than new rail because it needs $10 billion or so just to fix its existing rail lines. Minneapolis's planned 11-mile light-rail line is going to cost just a bit under $1 billion.

That's the magic, say rail backers: That cities sink that kind of money into a route tells the public that a place is committed to transit. Bus routes are somewhat flexible, but tracks in the ground are not, and only that eternality draws the kind of real-estate density that reshapes American cities, shuts out the automobile, and turns Madison into Manhattan.

If that's your aim. And for a significant swath of rail transit's most passionate backers, it is. Rail transit is not simply rides but a force for making Americans change how they live, away from drive-thrus and cul-de-sacs and toward high-rises clumped around subway stops.

If one wants that, New York beckons. The problem for social engineers is a lot of Americans prefer something else. For years, rail has been talked up as both the enabler of such density and the excuse for subsidizing and imposing it.

Bus rapid transit deflates this. It does spur development — Mr. Calabrese notes $4.3 billion in new private development along the yet-to-open Cleveland route.

But it does it at a reasonable cost, so cities aren't compelled to justify their investment by banning suburbs, as Portland, Ore., has tried to do. Mr. Hinebaugh notes that the high-end buses can even fan out into suburbs beyond the end of the high-speed part of their lines, accommodating customers where they want to live rather than making them live where transit can most easily serve them.

This is good for American freedom. Not to impugn subways and high-rises. They're fine if you want them.

Not everyone does, though, nor do they want the taxes need to run subways when reasonable new ways of improving bus service will do just fine.

Mr. McIlheran is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.