Cherry Lane Capital provides catalytic project capital to support sustainable solutions across energy, food, water, and transportation industries. Their expertise and capital source are unique among existing debt and equity capital sources.
Strategic planning, leadership, and pilots at Metro are driving an aggressive vision for improving speed and reliability on its bus network, which includes adding more bus lanes, signal priority, and bulb-outs.
Safety
Safety for cyclists must always be the top priority when constructing new bike lanes. Lanes should be one-way only and follow traffic in its path to minimize collision risks with cars and reduce collision risks from car doors opening suddenly. They should also be marked with road markings and signs. In addition, heavy-duty physical separators such as curbs, poles, bollards, or barriers made from materials resistant to damage by heavier vehicles, such as polyurethane or heavy-duty plastic, should be installed along their length to separate them from traffic without hindering drivers’ vision or creating hazards due to open car door.
The Capital Circle Southeast corridor between Tram Road and Woodville Highway was created with both pedestrians and bicycles in mind, including 5-foot-wide sidewalks, 10-foot-wide trails, and bicycle lanes. Furthermore, this project included additional right-of-way that will enable future transit service expansion with buses or other modes as needed in future phases of this project.
Reconstructing this busy corridor also featured improvements designed to increase traffic flow and decrease congestion. These included improving signal synchronization at significant intersections and altering Woodville Highway’s traffic flow to increase efficiency through its corridor – helping decrease average speeds by over 20% while reducing the average time to travel one mile by nearly 50%.
PBOT monitors traffic operations on significant streets, key intersections, and local roads to understand current conditions, detect early warning signs of unwanted behavior, observe trends, identify issues, and implement mitigation responses. This monitoring involves traffic counts, field observations, and video observations; data collected includes speed, turning movement, vehicle queueing at intersections, driveway activity, and any observed user behaviors.
Capital Lanes takes your privacy very seriously and does not rent or sell your personal information without your consent. However, we may share your data with trusted partners who perform services for us, such as providing email or postal mail communications, analyzing data, or arranging deliveries; they are prohibited from using or sharing it for other purposes.
Efficiency
HOV lanes are designed to promote high vehicle occupancy rates (VVO), offering fast and reliable travel experiences. HOV lanes can also help reduce congestion and air pollution by restricting how many vehicles enter/exit the corridor during peak travel hours.
HOV lanes generally carry significantly more people than congested mixed-flow lanes, roughly the same number as an ideal mixed-flow lane operating at maximum capacity. However, they can work with considerably reduced speed limits than mixed-flow lanes.
At peak hours during this study period, California HOV lanes averaged 2,518 vehicles per hour-roughly equivalent to the maximum capacity of conventional freeway lanes operating under similar conditions. They achieved this high VVO through various strategies, such as variable price structures that adjust accordingly with traffic levels in HOT streets; such price structures aim at encouraging carpools and buses while deterring single-occupant vehicles from using these lanes when traffic congestion becomes severe.
Due to state VVO capacity limitations, HOV lanes have not met their full potential regarding person throughput. In some instances, this may be because these lanes are located where congestion levels have yet to reach an impossible threshold that offers enough time savings incentive for carpooling; alternative solutions to carpooling may also exist and thus prevent their optimal utilization.
Statewide RTPAs present an unprecedented opportunity to maximize HOV lanes’ efficiency by expanding access and encouraging ridesharing, mainly through park-and-ride facilities. Research conducted by RIDES for Bay Area Commuters revealed that 60% of carpoolers reported being influenced by carpool lanes when making decisions to join or continue carpooling; their removal may cause many carpoolers to disband and return to solo driving, causing congestion to increase further on mixed-flow lanes.
Reliability
Reliability in transportation systems can be measured by their ability to maintain speed and availability during high-traffic periods. Capital lanes are an effective tool for improving bus service reliability; however, to assess it more thoroughly, other factors must also be considered, such as vehicle occupancies, trip lengths, and travel patterns that affect reliability. There are measures available that help Metropolitan Planning Organizations understand and measure them more thoroughly.
Los Angeles (LA) area residents rely heavily on an efficient transit system for transportation needs, with large swaths of land allocated solely for single-occupancy vehicles (SOVs). Yet many residents choose buses over SOVs due to their cost-effectiveness, convenience, and flexibility – factors which led many of their community members to ride buses instead of cars due to cost-effectiveness, convenience, and flexibility. To encourage bus ridership more readily in the LA region, projects promoting modal equity have been implemented – LA Metro trialed peak-hour bus lanes on Flower Street to address congestion that made it hard for popular modes like buses (the most popular and affordable way of travel) to meet its capacity targets – piloted in summer 2019 by LA Metro driving peak-hour bus lanes on Flower Street to help its most popular and budget mode meet capacity targets effectively.
At peak times, up to 60 buses used the new bus lane per hour during peak hours, with cars allowed to use an adjacent car lane or make right turns. To complement its new bus lane, the agency implemented signs and pavement striping that communicated how drivers should share the road safely with transit vehicles. Furthermore, they implemented priority queue jumps at traffic signals to improve bus reliability so buses would receive priority over other cars when entering intersections.
Alongside its debut of a new lane, LADOT is also conducting the 495 Southside Study and holding public information meetings this year to collect community input on potential alternatives. One key focus of this research effort is gender equity – an aim shared with LADOT’s Changing Lanes initiative and prioritized participation by women representing various racial, ethnic, neighborhood, and income identities. Data collected through Changing Lanes will give LADOT insight into women’s needs when navigating Los Angeles’ transportation network.
