Who Cares About ART

Part One in Our Series on Albuquerque Rapid Transit

Part Two, Part Three, Part Four

Can urbanism ever get a foothold in the sprawly, car centric cities of the United States? Most American cities don’t have ⅓ of trips taken by bike like Amsterdam. Adding hundreds of miles of new bike lanes in a matter of a few years, like Paris, seems completely outside the realm of possibility. Even those cities in the U.S. that have seen some urbanism success are extreme outliers. Can we really expect Kansas City or Tulsa to adopt policies like Boston or Seattle? How can a city like Oklahoma City, with a population density of around 1000 people per square mile behave like Chicago, a city 10 times as dense? How can we expect citizens of Memphis to behave the same as citizens of Portland when they ride transit at 1/10th the rate? The bottom line is that most American cities are half single family zoning. It is both dangerous and inconvenient to get around any other way than by car. Stroads, highways, and parking lots have hollowed out and sent cities on the road to bankruptcy. Are we surprised when many Americans perceive urbanists fighting to make their homes more livable as flouting moral superiority and attacking the freedom of cars? The refrain in such arguments is often, “America isn’t Europe.” And they’re right.

But advocates for more livable places shouldn’t just give up. Making cities more compact, mixed use, housing rich, with more diverse transportation mode shares is a goal worth pursuing. These kinds of cities are more environmentally friendly, lead to closer knit and more fulfilling communities, and are more financially resilient. It’s worth fighting to make the Charlotte, North Carolina’s of the country better just as much as it is the San Francisco’s. So what do we do?

Well, what if I told you that a city with just around 600k people where over two thirds of properties are zoned as single family built the United State’s first gold rated Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) System? Transit nerds might already know that I’m talking about Albuquerque Rapid Transit (ART).

ART Route Map courtesy the city of Albuquerque

ART is a BRT system serving the Central Avenue corridor (also known as historic Route 66) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The route was chosen because Central Ave is the main East-West artery of the city. It already accounted for 40% of the city's entire bus ridership. It connects the University of New Mexico, including the attached hospital, and the city's thriving “Nob Hill” area with Downtown and Old Town, as well as covering a major crossing of the Rio Grande. The stretch of road covered by the ART is easily the single most important stretch for the city historically, economically, and culturally.

A map of Albuquerque showing in yellow Central Ave and highlighting the three most important districts connected by ART

ART began service in November of 2019, eight years after it was first proposed in 2011 and three years after construction began in 2016. It runs nearly all the way across the city, from Tramway Blvd to Unser Ave, nearly 14 miles with 9 miles of guideway. With dedicated right of way in the form of a center running dedicated bus lane, off-board fare collection (rendered moot as it was made permanently free in 2023), intersection priority, platform level boarding, and 8-15 minute frequency ART has all the elements of a high capacity transit system and was the first American BRT to earn a gold rating from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.

We’re used to thinking of Albuquerque as nothing more than the place Bugs Bunny should have made a left turn at, but ART offers a lot to learn from. ART is a fantastic example of a poor city trying to scale up their transit incrementally and flexibly. On the one hand, construction on ART took much longer than expected, largely as a result of parallel projects, like bus electrification. Thus ART offers lessons about how we can avoid mishaps by limiting the number of new things we try to do at once. But on the other hand, ART was only 11% over budget and both increased ridership and reduced the number of drivers along the Central Ave corridor. So there are plenty of positive lessons to be learned from the flexible approach taken by transit officials on the project.

But despite its modest technical success, ART was extremely unpopular. In a speech at the beginning of his tenure current mayor of Albuquerque, Tim Keller, called ART a lemon. Business owners and citizens alike pushed to stop the project. The New Mexico Restaurant Association even backed a suit to stop it in 2016. Thus we can see from ART that technical barriers may not be the most severe. Political barriers can present equally deleterious setbacks, and ART offers us lessons on how to avoid them.

What Albuquerque teaches us is that even in cities that might seem like lost causes, change is possible. We can take from ART specific strategies and lessons on how to turn other car brained American cities into something better and more livable. What did the city do to achieve their technical success? What precautions did they take? What were their incremental steps? How did they maintain flexibility? Why, despite technical success, was the project so politically unpopular? How can future projects in similar cities build legitimacy and avoid such vehement opposition?