BRT comes to DC via Hollywood
Video still showing Cleveland’s center-running BRT, from the filming of Captain America, Winter Soldier. Click image for original video.
I recently watched “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” with some friends recently at the theater near Gallery Pl-Chinatown. I had heard rumors that the film was set in DC, which was a selling point since it’s always fun hearing names of local streets or venues and picking out inconsistencies between Hollywood’s portrayal and the real thing. Our friends over at Greater Greater Washington already noted that this film replaces parts of Rosslyn and Roosevelt Island with a massive S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters complex.
But little did I know that the film would take me to Cleveland.
Pretty early on in the movie there is a car-chase scene where Director Fury is pursued through the streets of “Downtown DC” by the MPD cruisers. The chase is fast and destructive, and takes place along a major urban arterial that has… BRT?!? You can see from the image above that the roadway has center-running bus lanes. And in this tiny picture you can see the red-painted center lanes. In the film, you can watch as a police car slams into a BRT station/shelter not dissimilar to this one. This video shows more scenes of BRT in Washington D.C., or I mean Cleveland, Ohio.
Metro is working with our regional partners to provide higher quality bus service on surface streets through the Momentum Metro 2025 Priority Corridor Network strategy, including transit signal priority, off-board fare payment and dedicated lanes. Unfortunately, while Hollywood can bring faster buses to “DC” over night, getting real bus priority on the District’s streets takes planning, coordination and advocacy.
That shot appears to have been taken from the Hanna Building, which is located in the Playhouse Square neighborhood along Euclid Ave. The BRT is known as the HealthLine: it links downtown Cleveland to the cultural and medical institutions at University Circle (former Clevelander here).