How to Judge Bus Lanes Fairly
A Bus Lane Is Not a Traffic Jam Test
I have been seeing the same argument circulate this week: if a bus lane appears beside slow-moving cars, the lane must be making traffic worse. That conclusion is tempting because everyone can see the queue. It is also a very incomplete measure of what the street is doing.
A bus lane changes who gets priority. The relevant comparison is not only car speed before and after. It is how many people move through the corridor, how reliably buses arrive, whether people can cross safely, and whether the lane is actually enforced. A bus carrying 35 people past a line of cars is not failing because the cars are still in a line.
The uncomfortable part is that a bus lane can be badly designed and still be a better idea than no bus lane. If it has unclear hours, poor loading space, blocked intersections, or no accessible boarding area, people will experience those flaws directly. “Transit priority” is not a magic phrase that excuses weak implementation.
When these debates appear online, I would like to see three numbers together: person throughput, bus travel-time reliability, and traffic delay by time of day. A before-and-after photo cannot answer all of that. What other measures would make these arguments less dependent on whichever vehicle happened to be in the frame?