Bus rapid transit has been used to great effect in cities around the world both as a primary mode and as a means to improve city bus service. This section reviews infrastructure-intensive implementations which include dedicated busways, pre-boarding fare collection, multi-door buses with floors aligning with station platform edges, as well as less costly improvements which have resulted in faster city bus service.
Infrastructure-Intensive Implementations
BRT has long been the dominant mode in cities like Pittsburgh, Ottawa, and Curitiba, Brazil. In recent years, BRT has opened to great success in some of the densest and most populous cities in the world, including Quito, Ecuador and Bogota, Columbia (pictured below; visit StreetFilms to view a 7.5 minute video on Bogota's BRT system). Bus rapid transit in Jakarta, Indonesia (the tenth-most-populous and ninth-densest city in the world, according to United Nations statistics) opened in 2004. A BRT system will soon begin operations in Guangzhou, China, a city of 10 million people.
Many high-end urban BRT systems consist of "line-haul" routes, on which buses serve stations along a busway corridor in the same way that a metro system serves stations on a line. The main advantage these types of BRT systems have over light or heavy rail is capital cost and speed of implementation. A bus rapid transit line can provide essentially equivalent service to light rail in terms of infrastructure size, speed, reliability, and capacity, at lower capital cost.
However, BRT's flexibility is still relevant in the urban context. As suburban buses can, city buses can pick up riders in local neighborhoods, enter a busway to beat traffic, then end their trip by circulating in a different local neighborhood. Buses have far more ability to switch from one busway to another (i.e. from one "track" to another), giving urban BRT systems the flexibility to quickly adapt to changing travel markets.
Pittsburgh has taken advantage of this flexibility on two of its three busways (the East and West Busways; the South Busway does not connect to other bus routes). These busways include all-stop routes that operate on the busway and circulate downtown, express buses which circulate in neighborhoods before entering the busway to travel downtown, through services which operate on both the East and West Busways, and commuter routes which bring suburban passengers to the downtown or airport. More than half of East Busway riders come from beyond the busway limits.
Each of the three busways reduced travel time and increased service reliability. Most impressive was the East Busway's performance. According to the FTA's Transit Cooperative Research Program, downtown travel from the East Busway terminus at Wilkinsburg used to take anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes, depending on weather and traffic. The same trip now takes 9 to 13 minutes. According to the Port Authority of Allegheny County, the 16.1-mile busway system is cheaper to operate and maintain than Pittsburgh's light rail and streetcar service ($2.55/passenger for BRT compared to $3.22 for light rail and streetcar).
Pittsburgh's busways were also successful in attracting transit-oriented development (see next section).
Improving City Bus Service
In cities with heavily used bus systems, less infrastructure-intensive BRT solutions can be used to improve local and express bus systems. New York City's Select Bus Service has rolled out in the Bronx to rider acclaim, with 98% customer satisfaction on the Bx12 Select. The Select service uses off-vehicle fare payment, multiple-door buses, frequent service, and on-street bus lanes. Ridership is has increased 30% over the limited-stop service it replaced, and it has cut travel times by about 20 percent. New York City plans to further develop Select Bus Service in all five boroughs, and the Pratt Center for Community Development has offered a vision that shows how BRT could transform transportation throughout the city.
Las Vegas' MAX bus rapid transit service runs in on-street bus lanes and uses signal priority, off-vehicle fare payment, multiple-door buses, and level boarding. It was introduced on Las Vegas' 7.5-mile Route 113 bus corridor in 2004. In an evaluation performed six months after MAX's introduction, the Federal Transit Administration found that ridership on the
corridor had increased by 25 percent (from 7,800 to 9,800 passengers
per day), and 25 percent of MAX riders said they were new to
transit. MAX cut travel time on the 7.5-mile corridor in half (to 25
minutes) and gained a reputation for reliability and convenience (as
measured by passenger surveys).
Los Angeles' Metro Rapid buses use traffic signal priority and level boarding but neither run in dedicated lanes nor use off-vehicle payment. Still, they have resulted in significant speed and ridership gains. The first two Metro Rapid corridors saw a 20% decrease in travel time and a 40% increase in ridership.
