The second important source in considering light rail and transit alignments and facilities in downtown Sacramento is the Downtown Sacramento Transit Circulation and Facilities Plan Concept, published in 2012.

Since this pre-dates the Grid 3.0 Plan mentioned yesterday, some of the ideas were included in the more recent plan, however, this document provides a great deal more detail about specific streets and situations, and traffic and delay analysis in the appendices, though it is not a design document. One of the notable issues with the document is that it pretty much ignored light rail (“Light rail service was not a significant focus of this study given the relative permanence of light rail infrastructure and the short term focus of this study’s scope.”) and focused on buses, including SacRT, Yolobus, and the suburban commuter bus services.

A key focus of the plan was to analyze and solve transit delay, recognized even then as a major issue and more prominent today because of Golden 1 Center and revival of the downtown area.

The document has a table of 19 actions in the “Improvement Toolbox” (pages 18-19), but the items identified in the preferred alternative (pages 60-61) are:

• grouped bus stop patterns

• balanced stop spacing

• simplified and consolidated route alignments

• bus lanes

• bus bulbs

• stop amenities

Below are two key maps from the document, Preferred Bus Lanes (pdf) and Preferred Transit (pdf). On the preferred bus lanes map, north-south streets are 5th, 7th, 8th, and 15th, and the east-west streets are J, L, and P, shown in blue highlight The light rail system is shown in grey highlight. The two overlap on 7th and 8th Streets. On the preferred transit map, the complexity of routes and stops is shown for all downtown streets.

Next up: NACTO’s Transit Street Design Guide

• SacRT