France's second biggest city; Los Angeles; Moving towards Light Bus Network

Tranzwatching in Los Angeles and Lyon

A recent article by US transit writer Yonah Freemark in his highly respected blog "The Transport Politic" reveals both the City of Lyon in France and Los Angeles, USA appear to be moving towards Light Bus Network, the conceptual framework put forward in several recent "NZ in Tranzit" postings.

Obviously this is not because they read this obscure bottom-of-the-world publication, or indeed have even heard of this curious new expression "Light Bus Network" (a handy way of packaging and marketing a raft of interacting strategies and technologies and to alert the world to the fact that buses have moved on).

Rather the "Light Bus" concept itself brings together and builds upon growing trends in bus service delivery world wide, a  pattern of moving away from the concept of single linear journeys like a tram or train, towards a mosaic pattern where passengers can move faster and in every different direction, in particular using transfers to hop around a city.

A part of this is a simple and easy to read bus network, in the case of Lyon (capital of a region of almost 3 million people) with a hierarchy of routes, according to frequency and degree of pastronage. New peripheral routes, similar to The Orbiter in Christchurch are being introduced in Lyon as elsewhere too.