Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is a transportation idea whose time has come. It can provide answers for Washington's major concerns about increased traffic congestion, help with global warming, and a solution for the major headache of what to do about Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct. The concept is simple. Put the roads we have already built to good use: run fast, frequent bus service on them, with fewer cars.

Most of us prefer to drive rather than use the bus because the bus takes longer. After you sit at a stop for a half hour or so, you climb aboard and your bus is stuck in the same traffic as any car. Then you still have to stop every couple of blocks to pick up and drop off passengers.

What if we could greatly improve on these two big problems: long waits and slow rides?

The simplest way to start is to put more busses on the streets, especially on the high volume routes. The more frequently a bus comes to the bus stops close to where we live, the more likely each of us will leave the car at home. The more we decide to climb aboard, the fewer cars there will be on the street to get in the way and slow us down. With faster service, more of us will leave our autos at home, speeding up the busses even more.

Hey, this is already working, huh?

It is estimated that the transit improvements resulting from King County Executive Ron Sims' successful November Ballot proposal (Transit Now) will take 60,000 drivers off King county roads, and get them onto busses, simply by adding more busses.

But we can do more!

Most of Transit Now's 175 new busses will be crawling along in the same traffic as the old busses. But there is a better way.

For much of State route 99 (Aurora Ave), from Downtown to Shoreline, there already is a bus-only lane on the side of the street. This is neat for two reasons:

1. It speeds up buses, by getting the cars out of the bus running way , and

2. It slows the cars down, by taking part of the road away from them. This (slowing autos down) makes the bus more desirable, especially as you watch metro pass you by, while you're stuck in traffic. Most rational people should at least consider leaving their cars at home and riding these fast buses, thus taking even more cars off the road. Hooray!!

If we get really serious about bus-only runways, on all major routes, we'll speed up all those busses and take thousands more private autos off the streets of our cities.

It is estimated that BRT can be implemented in cities like Seattle, Tacoma, or Spokane for about one tenth of the cost of building a light rail system. This is not surprising, when the enormous costs of the rails and tunnels that are needed for light rail are considered. And when you look at environmental benefits, BRT really shines!

Autos are responsible for about one third of the global warming gases produced by a city like Seattle. According to a bus driver friend of mine, the standard, non-articulated, 40-passenger bus in the King County fleet gets about five miles per gallon of fuel (mpg). That doesn't sound like much, until you compare a car with a single driver (18 mpg) to a half-full bus with 20 passengers (100 passenger-miles per gallon!).

In Seattle, the need to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct provides us with a wonderful opportunity to get started on some serious BRT. Many are questioning the advisability of spending billions to either repair or replace the earthquake damaged viaduct. The People's Waterfront Coalition (PWC) was formed to advocate that we do what San Francisco and Portland did with their "big uglies": just tear it down and haul it away.

One of the many interesting facts pointed out on the PWC website (www.peopleswaterfront.org) is that--when asked in a poll conducted by Washington State--60% of today's viaduct users said they would no longer drive on it if a toll of $1 were charged as a way to pay for needed improvements. Does that sound like an indispensible tranportation link for those 60%?

Seattle City Council President Nick Licata wrote an op-ed in the Seattle P-I in October, in which he came out strongly against Mayor Nickels' tunnel idea for viaduct replacement. He believes we should simply re-build the current structure. Licata says that digging a tunnel would be far too costly, and just tearing the thing down would greatly increase auto congestion downtown, on I-5, and on Aurora.

True enough, if you don't consider adding BRT, which Licata did not. But, what if we took the $3 billion (state and local) already earmarked for the project, and spent it instead on adding many more busses, making bus-only lanes on arterials all over the city, and dropped the fare to 25 cents? West Seattle could get a fast, free bus over the new bridge to downtown for a year after the viaduct is shut down, then go to 25 cents.

People would feel like chumps when they didn't ride the bus instead of driving. Traffic congestion would plummet. We could add barcode tolls to high use areas--like downtown and the U-District--that would help pay for busses and further decrease traffic, as the successful system in London has done. People driving cars in those areas would be recorded and charged for the day by scanners mounted on street poles.

According to monorail champion Cleve Stockemeyer, King County already subsidizes each bus rider by $3.50 per trip. The $3 billion already earmarked for viaduct replacement would go a long way toward establishing a fast, frequent, and cheap BRT system for Seattle. We could forget about schedules or missing a bus, just go to your stop and wait five minutes for the next one. Maybe the rest of the county, and the state would like what they see and join in.