The Los Angeles Metro Rapid System: Designing Rapid Bus Service From the Sidewalk Up

Planning for bus rapid transit systems is becoming increasingly complex and sophisticated. Especially in vast metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, such planning requires the bird's-eye perspective of aerial photography, and even the astronaut's eye perspective of satellite imaging. But no matter how large the overall scale, there is another kind of perspective which should not be overlooked: the sidewalk perspective of the bus rider. Indeed part of Metro Rapid's success can be attributed to the fact that the macro scale of operational planning was, from a very early stage, coupled with the human scale design of its graphics and its architecture.