Instead of building a heavy rail line to serve the Dulles corridor, Virginia should build a bus corridor, or “busway” in the median of the Dulles toll road, contends Gabriel Roth, a research fellow with the free-market Independence Institute in the Washington Times. The busway could run spurs to Tysons Corner, Reston and Herndon.
Bus service is not highly regarded in the United States today, Roth concedes, but he believes a Bus Rapid Transit system could work in the Dulles Corridor. First, he notes, buses would enjoy unimpeded mobility, allowing them to move quickly and keep to schedules. Second, buses could be outfitted to higher standards than typical city buses — to whatever level the market demands. (Again, I’ll tout my preference for buses that allow passengers to plug in their laptops and access the Internet so they can read e-mail and surf the Web on the way to work.)
While the capital costs of BRT would be a fraction of heavy rail, a busway would have a much higher theoretical carrying capacity. The maximum travel forecast for Dulles Rail is 9,000 passengers per hour. An unimpeded highway lane can carry 1,000 buses per hour. If the market doesn’t support that many buses and mini-buses, a busway could accommodate other high-occupancy vehicles such as vans.
As with all such analyses, Roth assumes a Business As Usual scenario for land use. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, transportation planning cannot occur in isolation from land use planning. Where would the bus stations be located, how would passengers access those stations, and what are the appropriate densities and urban-design features around those stations? Any serious bid to serve the Dulles corridor with BRT would have to answer those questions. But Roth does makes a good case for at least taking a serious look at BRT.