Photo by Steven St. JohnTribune

Tribune

Bill Morrison (left) and Nils Coleman ride the bus south on Fourth Street as part of their daily commute. The street isn't served by the city's popular Rapid Ride buses, but it's one route under consideration as the service expands.

Photo by Charlotte Hill CobbTribune

Tribune

Rapid Ride is expanding, but how hasn't been decided. Three options stand out from the pack:

[1] From Central Avenue north on Coors Boulevard. The city already operates a lightly used Rapid Ride service here during peak commute hours.

[2] From Central Avenue north on Fourth Street, then over the Montaño Bridge to Coors Boulevard.

[3] Continue Central Avenue route to Tramway Boulevard.

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The darling of the city bus system may be coming to a major street near you.

Rapid Ride, ABQ Ride's popular, high-capacity express bus service that runs from Unser Boulevard to Uptown Center - mostly along Central Avenue - is set to expand its bus fleet by 50 percent in the coming months, although where those buses will go is still up in the air.

In the next couple of weeks, ABQ Ride will take delivery of six additional buses, and by April, the new routes should be in operation, said Greg Payne, the department's director.

Look for five or six public meetings in February to solicit input on where the new route might be headed.

"There's a lot of options out there," Payne said.

The expansion represents a milestone for the Rapid Ride, which is now more than two years old and routinely logs about 150,000 boardings per month, making it the second-most-used route in the city.

But Rapid Ride is more than just another bus. The service, with its speed, iconic red shelters and enviable ability to make traffic lights turn green, is part of a broader initiative to sell public transit to those who don't really have to buy it. While much of the ABQ Ride system serves the "transit dependent," Rapid Ride is targeted at a group of people called "choice riders."

Among those ranks is Albuquerque land use attorney and planner Lora Lucero.

Just after Rapid Ride's debut in December 2004, Lucero found herself making plans to buy a hybrid car to replace her dying blue Plymouth van. But instead, she took a plunge into the carless life.

She works from home, but uses the Rapid Ride to get to places like the credit union, the hairdresser and the Frontier Restaurant, where she eats at least once a week.

"If Rapid Ride went away, I'd have to rethink my whole strategy," Lucero said. "Because, frankly, I don't have a lot of patience for waiting."

While the Rapid Ride name might be unique to Albuquerque, the concept has roots in the Brazilian town of Curipiba. There, authorities pioneered a limited stop system with dedicated bus lanes where passengers bought their tickets before boarding, thus minimizing stop time.

"This really caught the attention of the international community," said Roderick Diaz, a transit consultant with the Los Angeles firm STV Inc. "You have what looks like a metro system but operated on rubber-tire buses."

The recipe for attracting choice riders out of their cars essentially involves three ingredients: speed, reliability and frequency.

Speed is accomplished with limited stops, rigging the traffic lights to benefit the buses and, in some cities, dedicated lanes just for buses.

Reliability is just a matter of being on time.

And frequency, said Lurae Stuart, a program manager with the American Public Transportation Association, involves arriving often enough to eliminate cumbersome schedules.

"You really drive away choice riders when they have to dig up a schedule," she said.

In the 1990s, the Federal Transit Administration started encouraging cities to adopt the model, and today the technology has spread all over the country, including Phoenix, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Nev.

ABQ Ride already has mapped out more streets around town that could support a Rapid Ride, and is looking into how to pay for that eventual expansion, said Andrew DeGarmo, a planner with the department.

"Long term, if we have the resources, we're looking to have Rapid Ride routes that touch every part of the city," Payne said.

The study, however, does not currently have a deadline attached to it, said transit spokesman Jay Faught.

Expansion would add riders from the newly served areas, but the experience of other cities shows that if the routes are well connected, the original line will also see a significant ridership increase, sometimes as high as 50 percent.

"The effectiveness of a transit system in general depends on people's ability to connect with it," Roderick said. "A network of lines only helps your line succeed even better."

But Rapid Ride is only a steppingstone to bigger and better things, in the opinion of Mayor Martin Chavez. Though his modern streetcar proposal for Central Avenue is on hold, he didn't mince words about bringing it back soon.

"My intent," he said, "is to build a rail system in the city of Albuquerque and then use Rapid Ride as an adjunct to that."