The 38 Geary in all of its various incarnations (local, limited, express) is the busiest bus line in the US west of the Mississippi, carrying 55,000 passengers a day, more than any other SF Muni line including light rail, and nearly as many as the 60,000 who travel this corridor by car daily. This would seem to make the line a huge success.

Yet an ordinary bus on ordinary streets is subject to delays, and when the 38 stacks up, look out - huge crowds can assemble at major stops. 38 riders know that this can happen at an hour; furthermore, the 38L limited runs only at rush hour, meaning that a crowded weekend bus trip can also be a long one for Richmond District riders heading to and from downtown.

At the Velo Rouge Cafe near Golden Gate Park on a pre-Halloween Monday night, Zabe Bent of San Francisco County Transportation Authority, hosted by the SF Bicycle Coalition, presented Geary Bus Rapid Transit, a proposal to speed bus service along this corridor. Instead of replacing buses wholesale with a costly and slow, and thus unrealistic rail project (an opportunity probably lost when Marin spurned BART decades ago, the last time underground rail was relatively cheap), the idea with BRT is to re-engineer Geary to have dedicated lanes with stations on which buses would travel as if on rails.

This offers several distinct advantages over laying rail. First, it could be phased in gradually, with service continuing to improve as the network neared completion. Second, it allows for both local and limited service simultaneously (and the plan is to expand the hours of limited service to evenings and weekends). Rail lines such as the L-Taraval will never be faster because all trains make all stops, and cannot for the most part pass one another. Buses would also be fitted with wireless devices giving them signal priority at intersections (a technology that is already in place at certain intersections, but which would be more complete and sophisticated).

The images tell the story of how this would work - the lanes would be differently colored and potentially inaccessible (depending on the chosen layout) from normal traffic lanes, so that cars would know to stay out. They would be designed so that if there were a desire to add rail at some later point, the size and height would already accommodate it. Three basic reconfigurations of Geary were proposed: one in which the BRT lane was on the far right, as diamond lanes often are currently, with stations on the sidewalk, and two others featuring BRT lanes either at the far left, with stations in the median (along with greenscape along the wide median between stations), or with two medians and two bus lanes in between them.

Where will the space needed for this reconfiguration come from? Geary is for the most part wide enough to accommodate these changes west of Gough, but in some areas, parking that is currently configured as diagonal will have to be converted to parallel, and curb bulb-outs added. Therein lies the opposition to this plan from merchants and other residents of the Richmond, who fear that it will be more difficult to drive to and park in front of stores along Geary.

It's worth noting that there are also three different plans for reconfiguration of parking, and although two of them result in a loss of approximately 5% of parking spaces, one of them actually adds 16% more parking. Furthermore, the plan has not yet been refined to examine where diagonal parking could be added along perpendicular streets (as it is already configured, for example, outside Lamps Plus at Geary and 11th).

Anyone wishing to hear more about this plan, or to make their voice heard in the growing debate, can attend neighborhood workshops happening the first week of November and thereafter.

One fascinating detail about this plan is that it would result in a major reworking of two historic SF intersections: Geary and Fillmore in Japantown, and Geary and Masonic. Both currently use underpasses that would either be converted to accommodate bus stations or eliminated entirely. While it would at first seem undesirable to create busy street level intersections (and Geary and Masonic was apparently, before the addition of its viaduct, among the busiest in the city), the neighborhoods surrounding these intersections were clearly more vital before the underpasses were added, and eliminating them (or making them like subway stations for the bus) offers a major opportunity to weave communities back together and provides a better environment for pedestrians, cyclists, and neighborhood residents.