Queue Jumpers along Parmer and Lamar
Many intersections do not require additional land.
Where Parmer crosses MOPAC the bus could use the left turn
lane. There is no need to widen the road or buy land.
Parmer crossing Metric : Bus approaches from lower right.
Shoulders provide lane on far side of intersection. There is no need to
widen the road.
Parmer crossing IH35. Bus would use left turn lane. No road
widening is required.
Lamar crossing Braker. Lamar runs from upper right to lower left
in this image.
Road widening is required. Three out of four corner businesses not
severly effected.
Business on south west corner might take a hit.
Lamar crossing Rundberg. Road widening is required.
Corner businesses not severly effected because they have large lots
and/or green buffer space.
Lamar going under 183. No widening required
Lamar and Airport. Road widening is required.
On the left side of Lamar there is enough green buffer space so that
impact on those businesses would be minimal.
On the right side the queue jumper lane would be taken out of the those
large triangular pedestrian islands.
Lamar and Koenig. Wideing is required. Most businesses on
the corners will not be effected much.
Gas station on southwest corner corner might need to move its pumps.
Business on northwest corner might lose 10% of its parking lot.
Businesses on right side have enough buffer green space.
These intersection examples show that impacts on corner businesses
would be extremely slight.
Some land would need to be bought.
But buying land at a few intersections would cost only a few hundred
thousand dollars per mile.
This is much cheaper than the $ 30 million a mile we would spend on
light rail.
Not every intersection along Lamar, or Parmer, would need a queue
jumper.
These shown are at intersections where roads with heavy traffic cross
each other.
Where a major road, like Parmer, crosses a minor road, like Scofield
Farms,
the traffic does not tend to back up on the major road.
This is probably because the major road gets a much longer green than
the minor road.
A bus passing through a queue jumper would probably delay car
traffic by about twenty seconds.
But the intersection would pass just as many, or more people with a
combination of express bus and car traffic.
Two lanes of car traffic will pass about 20 single occupant cars in 20
seconds.
The bus will carry 40 riders , on average, in those same 20 seconds.
And each of those bus riders will be saved 34 seconds on average.
The delays caused by queue jumpers will probably be less
than the delays now caused by conventional bus service.
With conventional service the buses stop in the road to kill a minute
or so every mile.
They do these to stay on schedule. The idea is to reach each stop at a
scheduled time
so that timed transfers can be done reliably. Many routes run
with 30 minute headways.
If they pass a stop a few minutes ahead of schedule they can miss a
rider who wished
to transfer from some other bus. That rider would be left standing by
the road for another 30 minutes.
On most days they could probably run the route at 15 mph or 4 minutes a
mile.
But the schedule is to run it at 11 mph , or 5.4 minutes per mile.
So every mile they block a lane for a minute or so. Precise adherence
to schedule is
important when many routes are running on headways of 30 minutes
or more.
Lane blocking, to stay on schedule, would not be required with
CMT.
The circulators would not be under the same pressure to keep a schedule
because they run more frequently and
most transfers are done at transit centers. When both express and
circulators run their routes every ten minutes
the precise time of each pickup is not critical.
An exception to this is the off peak van trip that arranges to pick up
a rider at a stop along a route at a precise time.
Vans might need to idle for a minute or two on such trips. But vans are
small and can maneuver.
They can wait in some nearby parking lot and don't need to stop in the
road blocking traffic.
Bus travel has to get faster for more people to ride it.
Queue jumpers are a low cost way to make express bus service faster.
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