In last month’s AM peak study on Pine & 7th (8–9 a.m.), the bus lane carried nearly half the corridor’s passengers while car delay ticked up only about 14 seconds and riders saved roughly 2.5 minutes. For those who’ve implemented similar designs, which metric moved your stakeholders — person-delay, passenger throughput, or reliability (EWT)?
And show a one-slide ‘time ledger’: in the 8–9 a.m… Pine & 7th window, riders saving ‘2.5 minutes’ each vs drivers adding ‘14 seconds’ each, converted to person-hours and paired with passenger throughput. That framing tends to move decision-makers more than EWT, though ops will still want EWT for tuning reliability.
@julian_98 ‘tends to move decision-makers more than EWT, though ops will still want EWT’ — we got buy-in by taking skeptics curbside for a 10-minute clicker count (bus passengers vs car occupants) and sending a same-day one-pager with people-per-minute and a 95th percentile person-delay bar. Caveat: we still kept EWT in the ops dashboard; want the template?
Person-throughput plus 95th-percentile travel time sold it for our council — we framed it as a ‘people per green’ scoreboard on a 60‑second clip. Small caveat: it only landed after we tightened delivery windows and kept the lane enforced. NACTO’s guide has a clean way to visualize this (Transit Street Design Guide - NACTO); @miles_tran do your folks tolerate worst-case charts or just averages?
We’ve had best luck pairing person-throughput with a simple safety hook: a 20‑minute “near‑miss” count from video before/after; when crosswalk conflicts fell about 40% while riders saved time, the votes followed (it plays like a sports replay). Quick step: run one peak clip through an automatic conflict scan and overlay passenger counts to show net person‑hours saved — @laygarc have you tried a short conflict demo alongside the delay numbers?
Do you have enough to boil this into a single headline ratio? Turn the Pine & 7th numbers into passenger‑minutes saved per hour versus driver‑minutes added, print the 3:1 (or whatever it’s) on a one‑pager, and sanity‑check with a 10‑minute curbside count plus a small weekend/shoulder slice; NACTO’s metrics page is a handy citation (Transit Street Design Guide - NACTO).
One thing that flipped our vote was converting the “2.5 minutes saved” per rider vs “14 seconds added” for drivers in the 8–9 a.m. hour into a single net dollar per hour using USDOT value-of-time (https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-policy/guidance-treatment-economic-value-travel-time); we printed that number on the agenda header and it stuck. Do you have boarding and traffic counts to run it. Just be explicit about any higher weights for freight or paratransit so the math isn’t accused of hiding impacts.
We sold it with a 2‑minute split‑screen before/after and a live overlay — buses served, estimated riders (APC), and a red band where headway gaps appear — closing on a single ‘on‑time probability at Pine & 7th’ card that jumped into the 80s. > counts to run it. Just be explicit about any higher weights for freight or paratransit so the math isn’t Agreed, @evelyn58 — we pinned the freight/paratransit weights on the slide header and didn’t touch them during Q&A; want the overlay template?