The Promise & Danger of BRTs

It’s important to remember as mentioned in the video that “putting the rider at the center” is key and that “BRT can provide excellent service” so I’m not dismissing that they can provide good transit which is the most important thing, but I think in a lot of cases it could be and would be better as some form of rail.

Just a correction, BRT was invented in Curitiba, Brazil in 1974. Bogota implanted around 2000 and somehow get all the credits. Jaime Lerner invented the system, an urban planner ahead of his time and deserves credit for his work, not a marketer mayor of Bogota. Lerner converted normal car streets in pedestrian-only streets too with "Rua XV de Novembro" in 1972.

One thing ive also noticed from taking a lot of transit in toronto: on occasion i have had motion sickness on the bus but never felt that on the streetcars or in the subway. I appreciate the smoother ride, and more consistent speed, the streetcars and subway are less wobbly too. The "railed" really make a difference in my ride experience.

I'm from Bogotá and I've been using our BRT since the first line was built 2 decades ago. We have the busiest BRT in the world just because we are a 10-million metropolis without a metro. Transmilenio was a temporal healing but nothing further than that. Now we are waiting anxiously our first 2 metro lines.

There's a lot of elitism and snobbery that comes into play when buses are discussed. You can't always build a train track. BRT shouldn't be the first choice but in the right situations, it fulfills a need.

THANK YOU for bringing up the number of operators needed for BRT vs Metros, I feel like that doesn't get highlighted nearly enough. Like you said, many developing countries which rely on BRT have pretty low wage requirements for their drivers, while advanced nations (i.e. Canada, USA, Germany, etc) not only have high wage requirements but are often facing a shortage of available labor. Even rail transit systems in many cities are having trouble getting enough drivers for trains that can carry 1000 passengers!

Calgary’s MAX Lines are BRT-ish and are pretty popular. Building them happened a lot faster than if we were to do trains. There’s also a lot of shudders oil money that floats around to kill trains… So it gave us something fast and generally unopposed. But hopefully we get more trains.

I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a deep dive into the MBTA Silver Line, but it’s a fascinating mess. Specifically look up the absurdly fancy underground metro-style Courthouse and World Trade Center stations in the Seaport than surface to then operate circuitous routes in congested mixed traffic

When I lived in Pittsburgh in the early 1990s. The East Busway and the South Busway worked well. Both were built on rail corridors. Both had routes that branched off to serve various neighborhoods. Suburban companies such as 88 Transit Lines and DeBolt used them too. I used route EBA (East Busway All-stops) every day and found it to be very quick.

If you want to dig further in the problems with BRT, have a look of the system implemented in Belo Horizonte ( Brazil ). It's a city with the population comparable to Toronto ( little more than 6million ) but is also a metropolitan center, meaning that a lot of people from nearby cities come to word or do business everyday. So the city had only a small metro system with one line and the rest of public transportation was (and still is) done by bus. So almost 15 years ago when they decided to improve the city public transport, instead of follow the specialist and expand the metro, they chose to follow the corruption way and go with the BRT route to satisfy all the corrupt politicians. It's clear that the system was created to the benefit of the operators. So they did the BRT with exclusive lines, big buses, air conditioner and all. THen the public hated. They eliminates a lot of bus lines and the rest became short route lines, wich means that they would only carry you to the nearest BRT station and go back to the neighborhood. The traffic became even worse with the exclusive lines and to get to a BRT station was awful because they had to build were it does have a lot of space. One year later a research showed that the new system added in average 20% more in the commute time for the users. To put in perspective a good amount of users already expended between two and three hours in the traffic just to go to work, so 20% increase in time to go and to go back is huge. Worth to mention that the research doesn't include the time to get to the station neither the time to buy the tickets. Since than the sales of motorcycles and used old cars skyrockets because people prefer to spend hours inside a car or to cut the traffic with the motorcycles, than be trapped in a bus like tuna.

Hi Reece, I see a difference between BRT that is used for BRT-specific routes, as you would arrange a metro, and BRT that is used for a variety of bus routes that each have part of their routes on a common road. In my mind, the latter situation makes a stronger case for BRT, since higher order transit on all these various routes may be prohibitvely expensive. I see Dundas St. in western Toronto and Mississauga as a good candidate for this kind of BRT. Many TTC and MiWay bus routes use Dundas from Kipling station, but then spread out north, south, and west. Dundas being a busy street, a busway would allow them to bypass car traffic.

A lot of these rankings tend to be to rigid in their criteria and thinking. Like Pittsburgh's Busways get points docked for not having platform level boarding and off board fare collection and it makes them sound like bad systems but they're actually completely grade separated bus highways that don't intermingle with regular traffic at all and serve thousands of people daily living in the south, east, and west suburbs of the city. The South Busway was actually opened in 1977. First BRT in the US and only 3 years after Brazil pioneered the idea. I used to take the West Busway into downtown for work every day when I lived near a stop because it brought my total commute time down from >40 minutes to <25 minutes vs driving the same distance, finding parking, and walking to my building because the West Busway allowed the bus to get almost entirely to downtown before having to mix with any traffic.

Pittsburgh resident here, not sure what “level” of brt we have but I love the busways here! They integrate really well with the trolleys and biking and are good for keeping buses moving around congestion

Here to say the transitways in Pittsburgh are impressive. Pittsburgh is especially amenable to grade separation because the city itself is built on steep hills and the transitways are largely reusing old railbeds.

I use BRT in İstanbul to go to the school everyday. I think it is really fast and has very frequent buses. They arrive to the stations like less than a minute! Also they are cheap for the students. They are integrated with all other transportation systems in the city.

Transit planners in the 60s: "Rip out the street cars, buses are the future" Transit planners in the 2010s: "Rip out the metros, Buses are the future of rapid transit" Thank goodness for progress /s

If they are willing to shill out money on a separate roadway, why not electrify it and run BRT with trolleybuses?

I think one of the great promises of BRT, particularly BRT-Lite, is the ability to serve a higher number of corridors than you would otherwise be able to. Because you can keep the cost of construction so low for BRT-Lites, you might be able to upgrade 6 corridors for the price of 1 true BRT, or 20 for the price of 1 LRT. If you provide great service along each corridor, all of a sudden you have a full transit network that is more useful to more people. Now, this isn't to dismiss the need for metro/LRT along higher demand corridors, but I do think there are a lot of cities (particularly in North America) that could benefit from a full network, service centric BRT-Lite approach.

I think I generally agree, you alluded to this, but BRT can be approached from two different sides and where you approach it from will dictate whether it is a positive thing or not. If a region approaches BRT from the "enhancing our bus service" direction, it can be a very positive (albeit problematic in the long term) strategy. Basically a region which has a lot of bus service, and especially when a lot of those buses end up concentrated in a few corridors in the more dense areas, those busy bus areas can be improved. First with improved stations, then improved features like queue jumps, and eventually full bus lanes. Because it can be built using iterative improvements, BRT can be achieved without the need for a huge influx of cache along with long disruptive construction periods, and this can sometimes be a better trade off with better service now, for existing and latent riders, at the cost of some reduction in the long term potential of growth. But for a region which cannot get the investment needed for a huge project, or is too much underwater on existing demand to suffer the huge disruption of a major project it can be a very valuable option. The potential advantage of BRT is that a system can provide a lot more single ride services, by having local buses transition into the BRT system. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on a lot of local contextual factors. But if BRT is planned AS a megaproject, well...in my experience, BRT is chosen because it's a shiny thing that money can be spent on, but which the hard political issues that would apply for an LRT for example where it would have to sacrifice space for cars to fit the right of way, well...those problems can just disappear along with dedicated lanes.

An interesting approach is in Oberhausen, Germany there is a hybrid sytem, where trams and buses share the same route. In that way, you get a higher frequency and serve more different routes.