What would you do with 120 feet of right-of-way?

Have you seen those road cross sections you see in planning documents describing new projects and wished you could quickly and easily redraw them yourself?

Now you can play the amateur planner with a cool new toy called Streetmix. I created a cross section for median Bus Rapid Transit (as proposed, more or less, by VTA) along portions of El Camino Real where the right of way is 120 feet across.

Streetmix: EL Camino Real Bus Rapid Transit cross section

Don’t like what you see? You can click through to my Streetmix, change it up and create whatever you’d like.

See more details about Streetmix and possible future enhancements over at Streetsblog.

7 Comments

  1. It looks like you have the shoulders and bike lanes reversed. Put the shoulders to the right of the bike lanes and cyclists can use the entire space (bike lane and shoulder). For cyclists in the shoulder, the bike lane is their buffer. All the existing traffic laws work with the right-side buffer/shoulder.

  2. Figure about 3m clearance needed for loading and unloading wheelchairs. There is a good reason buses use the right-hand lane.

    If you are going to dedicate a bus lane, put it to the right of the bike lane.

  3. I’ve mocked up VTA’s proposal for median BRT lanes, and I wondered if somebody would catch that my bus stop is on the wrong side of the bus.

    The screenshot shows an earlier rendition with a mistake that’s corrected in a later version. In the correct version, the station sits to the right of the bus lane (and to the left of the regular travel lanes) so passengers can use the right-side door on the bus. This is similar to the light rail stops on 1st Street north of Japantown.

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