Taking the bus could be a more attractive way to commute if the transit commission goes ahead with plans for lane changes on some of the region鈥檚 busiest roads.
Without seriously cramping the style of other drivers, changes to routes like Douglas Street would move buses more quickly, according to a report to the Victoria Regional Transit Commission. The report focuses on Douglas Street, the McKenzie corridor to the University of Victoria and the Island Highway from View Royal to Colwood.
Congestion through Colwood and View Royal is famously frustrating. The stretch of Douglas Street between Belleville and Hillside, which sees 500 to 900 buses a day carrying 17,000 to 23,000 passengers, is the busiest spot in the city.
To move buses faster, the report proposes a variety of solutions.
Along the Island Highway, transit wants to add 鈥渜ueue-jumper鈥� lanes at the Goldstream intersection, Six Mile intersection and Trans-Canada Highway interchange. These queue-jumper lanes allow buses to zip past traffic that is backed up behind intersections.
Similar jumper lanes would be built along McKenzie Avenue at Quadra, and on McKenzie between Cedar Hill Road and Shelbourne.
One such lane is already in place at McKenzie and the Trans-Canada Highway. Another is under construction at Sayward Road and the Pat Bay Highway.
On Douglas Street, the solutions are labelled Concept A, Concept B and Concept C, but all include dedicated bus-only lanes at certain times of day. For two hours in the morning rush and two in the afternoon rush, buses would have clear sailing up those lanes.
To speed things up even more, the report suggests loading passengers through the front and middle doors of a bus at the same time. That would require kiosks where travellers could pay in advance. The amount of time saved seems debatable, considering that passengers still have to get off the bus first, by both doors.
Time-limited bus-only lanes are a better option than earlier proposals for permanent bus-only lanes, which had sparked angry opposition. Creating the lanes could mean changing designations on existing lanes, which would cost about $600,000, or more costly options ranging as high as $5 million if the street is widened to add lanes.
Some have suggested the lanes should be for both buses and high-occupancy vehicles, but that is the wrong way to go. Extra vehicles would just slow the buses and erase the time savings. HOV lanes in other cities have to be policed to stop drivers from filling their cars with inflatable 鈥減assengers.鈥�
The time savings in the report appear small, about four minutes per bus on Douglas, but they add up in a way that could entice more drivers out of their cars. For some drivers, sitting trapped in a jam and seeing the bus fly past in its own rush-hour lane could be the tipping point.
It worked that way in Kelowna, where planners hoped bus-priority lanes would lure seven per cent of commuters to switch to transit. Instead, said Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin, 14 per cent made the leap.
The more people switch to buses, the fewer cars will clog the streets and the faster all vehicles will move during the commute.
It鈥檚 only a partial solution, of course, to Victoria鈥檚 traffic problems. Studies consistently show that anywhere there is road capacity, drivers swiftly fill it up; widened roads, for instance, ease congestion for a short time, but are soon jammed to capacity.
The debate over a proposed $1-billion light-rail system from the West Shore promises to be just as fierce as the debate over sewage treatment.
Until that is resolved, priority bus lanes are a good start.
