American Dream

Eugene, Oregon, starts construction of a $22-million route for bus-rapid transit. Bus-rapid transit makes sense, but only if it operates on roads and streets shared with other motor vehicles. Eugene plans to build exclusive bus lanes that will cost as much as other roads but carry only a tiny fraction of the people.

Eugene's Lane Transit District sold this concept using very deceptive photographs showing futuristic buses running in the medians of existing roads. The only problems are:

1. The buses are structurally impossible (the real bus will look like this) and
2. There is no median in this particular road, so building the bus-rapid transit means converting general traffic lanes that carry 10,000 to 15,000 passenger miles per mile per day to exclusive bus lanes that will probably carry about a third of that.

The right picture in this pair of photos shows what bus-rapid transit should really look like: fairly ordinary buses on existing streets. They are rapid because they stop fewer times than ordinary buses and also because they operate more frequently, meaning passengers spend less time waiting.

While the city will take right-of-way from existing streets in some areas, in others they have had to use eminent domain to get land from private owners. The main losers are businesses such as a Taco Time and the Spring Garden restaurant.

The groundbreaking ceremony was fully in keeping with the deceptive history of this project. In reality, no ground was broken. Instead, somebody dumped a pile of dirt on the ground so that a bunch of politicians could heft fake gold-plated shovels of dirt around.