London calling: what car-free lanes and cameras can do for bus service 

London calling: what car-free lanes and cameras can do for bus service

A recent NYTimes Op-Ed argued that now’s the time for cities to invest in bus, with commuting patterns significantly altered and billions of federal infrastructure funding available. London’s bus network, the author contends, demonstrates the payoff of leaning into the bus as a prime and primary mode of transportation.

I shared that impression when I first moved to London in 2003, immediately struck by the different role buses played there as opposed to the US cities where I’d lived before. Rather than a second-class option that could be slow, awkward to navigate, and frankly slightly embarrassing to take, the bus in London was a backbone of urban mobility, flexible, fast and the mode of choice for diverse riders at most income levels.

In the last couple years, DC has taken significant strides toward improving how buses work in the District, creating dedicated “car-free” lanes and limited enforcement pilots. With the Mayor breaking ground recently on a long-awaited bus lane on 16th St NW, can we learn anything from our cousins (ok, in my case my spouse; definitely not my cousin) about how high-quality bus service is done?

Stay in your lane

London’s bus system relies on the Transport for London Road Network (TLRN), a 580-kilometer (360-mile) network that uses only 5% of London road space but carries 35% of its traffic. Like DC’s burgeoning bus priority corridor network (nearly six miles at last count), London’s “red routes” are open not just to buses. They also carry bikes, motorcycles, and in some cases freight and ride-hail vehicles.

Bus lanes were introduced in London in 1968, with an experimental pilot that proved successful. Transport for London (TfL) has historically pinned its bus priority program to the need for a growing regional population to move around efficiently and sustainably in light of a “restricted urban streetscape,” also noting substantial cost savings both for travelers saving time and in terms of the numbers of buses required to serve similar numbers of passengers.

In September 2020, London, responding to a push to further improve the reliability of bus service to aid in pandemic recovery, introduced a pilot to make bus lanes operable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Since a pilot on H & I Streets NW demonstrated value and lessons learned and lessons to take away, DC has steadily built up its own bus lanes.

Enforcement is key

A dedicated lane’s only as good as the compliance of other road users. Transport for London addresses this with a system of cameras both in fixed locations and on the buses themselves that capture transgressions.

The cameras are effective in generating a culture of compliance. I’ve traveled (never driven - even after nine years, it would always feel like the wrong side of the road) in multiple cars where the driver, having accidentally entered a bus lane, swiftly nipped out on realizing their error.

Transport for London is the agency responsible both for the routes and for managing a vast system of cameras responsible for catching transgressing drivers. The Metropolitan Police have an agreement with TfL to manage non-camera based (in other words, a person has to do it) enforcement action, but this makes up a small fraction of the infractions recorded and fined.

Supporters of camera-based enforcement maintain that it’s much more effective as a deterrent, as cameras can catch nearly all transgressions, and the penalties arrive swiftly by mail, ensuring drivers psychologically connect their error with the fine. They can also be placed strategically near sites of frequent violations, while avoiding the accidental lane-swingers where drivers are known to make quickly-corrected errors. There can also be equity benefits in that the decision to engage with and punish an errant driver is not left up to human discretion, which as we know can be systematically biased, but technology based on license plate number recognition.

Camera-based enforcement of London’s bus lanes started in 1997. The system now includes both stationary and bus-mounted devices, which cost nearly £15 million (nearly $20.6 million in US dollars) in 2018 in expenditure but brought in £40 million in income, netting £25 million ($34.6 million in US dollars) that year.

A penalty fine for a vehicle not allowed to use the red routes is £160 ($210); this is reduced by half if paid on time. The enforcement system uses both Automated Vehicle Location(AVL) and Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology to pinpoint times of lane misuse and the vehicles in question. We have traffic cameras in DC, but historically not for bus lanes. In October DDOT launched a pilot bus lane camera enforcement system at the corner of Georgia Ave and Bryant St NW.

British riders’ comfort with cameras extends further than enforcement; many buses contain cameras on the vehicles themselves in pursuit of London’s Vision Zero 2041 commitment (and also to promote safety on the vehicles themselves, particularly the well-used night bus system).

Are bus services a pillar of mobility, or an also-ran to cars and rail?

Both financial and political investment play major roles. As with any other mode, demand for bus service doesn’t rise because individuals decide it’s a great societal goal. It’s high in London because the bus comes regularly and reliably, they move efficiently along their routes to places a lot of people want to go. That takes not just money for infrastructure, labor and capital costs, but also a concerted decision to center bus and bus priority in wider planning decisions (long a request from advocates for the Washington region). There has to be an assumption that the bus will move around a lot of people.

An integrated system of bus lanes means London’s buses don’t have to compete with cars to nearly the same degree they would elsewhere. According to various models, passengers benefit from commute times that are 16-25% shorter (both in London and on pilots exercised in the US).

In 2018, we estimated that commuters on the 16th St bus lanes would save between 2.5 and 4.9 minutes per passenger per round trip. It might not sound like much to one person, but multiply that by the 20,000 bus passengers that 16th St carried pre-pandemic every day, and the bus lane may save 200,000 hours per year.

That time savings matters for workers or people frequenting services and amenities, and also saving the costs of car ownership, on average $9,000 per year. But it also means lower carbon emissions, which London’s policymakers count as a win in terms of the environment, health, and the livability of residential and commercial areas.

A bus whose route timing can be predicted and regularized is valuable not just to passengers, who know when it’s coming, but also to transportation planners. At the press conference for 16th Street’s bus lane groundbreaking, WMATA’s GM Paul Wiedefeld touted the ability of bus priority lanes to improve scheduling, saving in operating costs as well as improving service. A functioning dedicated bus lane on 16th St NW is estimated to save WMATA about $8 million per year.

Better bus on the horizon for DC?

This month, DDOT released a bus priority toolbox that lays out the treatments under consideration and active deployment that may be used to improve the speed and reliability of bus service or create safer interactions with other modes.

Eyes will be on the upcoming Mayor’s budget to see the extent to which DC leans into the progress made in recent years to invest in bus priority as a catalyst for the District’s future mobility system.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the cost and revenue associated with London’s camera-based system were in the billions instead of the millions. The article has since been updated.