BRT “Faster and Cheaper” Than Rail

The World Bank is promoting bus-rapid transit as “green” and “sustainable transportation” that is “faster and cheaper to build than Metros,” meaning heavy rail. When operated with all-electric buses, says the agency, BRT will “cut life-threatening air pollutants” as well as greenhouse gas emissions.

A bus-rapid transit station in Dakar, Senegal. Photo courtesy of CETUD.

The World Bank is absolutely correct about the faster and cheaper part. However, it is overpromising when it comes to taking cars off the road. “Developing country cities that have not yet fully developed their land use and transportation infrastructure around cars can leapfrog car-centered culture and prioritize efficient, low-carbon urban transport that focuses on people rather than vehicles,” says a World Bank official. This is pure rhetoric that consigns developing cities to economic stagnation. Continue reading

The Rise and Fall of Bogotá’s Rapid Buses

The New York Times reviewed (non-paywall version) the ground-breaking bus-rapid transit system in Bogotá Columbia 23 years after it opened. The TransMilenio bus system first opened in December 2000 under fiscally conservative mayor Enrique Peñalosa and each route-mile is capable of moving more people per hour than New York City subways.

A high-capacity TransMilenio bus. Photo by Felipe Restrepo Acosta.

The system almost immediately doubled transit ridership, partly because the rapid buses were much faster than the buses they replaced but also because Bogota has a lot of low-income people who don’t own cars whose mobility was greatly enhanced by faster transit. Columbia had well under 200 motor vehicles per thousand people in 2000 (compared with more than 800 in the U.S.) and even today Columbia has fewer than 300 vehicles per thousand (compared with more than 900 in the U.S.). Whatever the reason, the rapid bus system carries up to 2 million riders a day, which is more than some U.S. light-rail lines carry in a year. Continue reading

Why Bus-Rapid-Transit Has Become Popular

Am I ahead of my time or simply out of step with the times? When I began studying light rail, I quickly realized that buses could do everything light rail could do except cost a lot of money. I was especially heartened when Kansas City, whose voters had rejected light rail in something like eight different elections, spent about $3 million a mile (about $4 million a mile in today’s money) installing two bus-rapid-transit (BRT) lines and got 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership, which is more than some light-rail lines get.

So I should be happy about recent reports favoring BRT.

  • As noted above, the World Bank reports that “Bus Rapid Transit takes cars off the road and moves people quickly, providing the benefits of metros at a fraction of the cost.”
  • An article in Research in Transportation Economics found that the values of homes within a 20-minute walk of a bus-rapid transit station increased by 5 to 7 percent and the total increase in property values was six times the cost of the BRT projects.
  • Jarrett Walker reports “good outcomes” from a new BRT line in Portland, specifically a 30 to 40 percent increase in ridership.

Continue reading

Houston BRT Failure

A Houston bus rapid transit route over dedicated bus lanes is attracting less than 10 percent of the riders that were projected for it. The Silver Line opened in August 2020 with the expectation that it would carry 14,850 weekday riders, but in fact it is carrying less than 900 riders per weekday, about 6 percent of projections.

A Houston Silver Line sits empty, which is not unusual for it even when in motion. Photo by Ricky Courtney.

Metro, Houston’s transit agency, originally wanted to put a light-rail line in the Silver Line corridor, but opposition from local residents led it to “downgrade” the line to bus rapid transit. According to Houston businessman Bill King, Metro still managed to spend $200 million on the 4.7-mile route, mostly through tax-increment financing. This was a lot less than the $500 million or so that light rail would have cost but still a lot more than necessary. Continue reading

Making a Good Idea Bad

Back when I first began studying light rail, one of my first questions was, “Why rail when buses can work just as well for a lot less money?” That question is becoming less valid today as transit agencies have done their usual job of making something affordable into something grossly expensive.

Proposed Charleston bus rapid transit line. Graphic by Low Country Rapid Transit.

A case in point is Charleston, South Carolina’s proposal for a bus rapid transit line. Local backers have the audacity to call it South Carolina’s first mass transit system, as if Columbia, Greenville, Charleston, and other South Carolina cities haven’t had bus systems for decades. But the real problem is that they want to spend $625 million on a 21-mile line, or about $30 million per mile. Continue reading

This Just In: Electric Buses Weigh More

Electric buses weigh more and put more stress on infrastructure than regular buses, as Indianapolis transit agency Indygo realized when it discovered that the streets it paved for its bus rapid transit lines were wearing out after less than three years of service. Now it is repaving those streets, which is causing problems for businesses and annoying residents along the routes.

An electric bus at one of Indygo’s bus rapid transit stops. Photo: Indygo.

The Indianapolis Department of Public Works had urged Indygo to use thicker pavement, but Indygo — which was already spending four years and too much money on a bus line that it could have started practically overnight at little cost — decided to save money on a part of the project that would be less visible to most people. After all, the point of the project was to please politicians with colorful buses and flashy bus stops, not to provide better transportation service. Continue reading

BRT Should Use Shared, Not Dedicated Lanes

Dedicating two of the six lanes on major streets in Chandler, Mesa, Scottsdale, and Tempe exclusively to buses would be a complete waste, says a new report released last week by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and two other groups in the Phoenix area. Each of the lanes that Valley Metro would take for buses typically move roughly three to four times as many people per day as would have taken the bus before the pandemic, and bus ridership has fallen by 50 percent since the pandemic.

Click image to download a 1.1-MB PDF of this 16-page report.

The report notes that bus rapid transit typically stops about once per mile compared with five or six times per mile for local buses. This allows the BRT buses to go faster, which along with higher frequencies makes them more attractive to riders. Giving the buses their own lanes does not significantly increase their speeds, but it does increase congestion for everyone else. Continue reading

The Perils of Bus-Rapid Transit

Ten years ago, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (Muni) decided to build a two-mile long busway on Van Ness Avenue, dedicating two lanes of the six-lane street exclusively to buses. The project was supposed to cost $125.6 million and make transit more attractive by speeding up buses. The planners’ calculations indicated that, without the project, buses would carry 50,800 transit riders a day. With the project, it would carry 52,400 riders, a 3.15 percent increase.

Van Ness before the busway. Click on image to see the original photo in Google street view.

The busway opened for business last week after more than a decade of planning and six years of construction. The final cost turned out to be $345.9 million, a mere 175 percent cost overrun. Ridership on Muni buses is currently about half what it was before the pandemic, and it will be a long time before the Van Ness route recovers to 50,800 riders a day, much less 52,400. Continue reading

Taking the Rapid Out of Bus-Rapid Transit

International Boulevard is a major northwest-southeast arterial that connects Oakland, California with its suburb of San Leandro. Until recently, it served businesses along the route with four lanes of through traffic, a center left-turn lane, and a parking strip on one and in some places both sides of the street.

Here’s a Google streetview of part of International Boulevard before AC Transit began turning it into a BRT route.

That’s changed as AC (for Alameda-Contra Costa) Transit has claimed most of the street for a bus-rapid transit route that is scheduled to start operating next week. Built at a cost of $232 million, the route reduces much of International Boulevard to a two-lane street with only a few left-turn lanes and few or no parking strips. Continue reading

BRT Doesn’t Stimulate Economic Development

Five years after spending $35 million on a bus-rapid transit line that opened in 2014, Grand Rapids is upset that the line hasn’t generated the economic development that was promised. In a classic case of throwing good money after bad, it is now spending nearly $1 million to prepare a plan that it hopes will remedy this failure.

The notion that bus-rapid transit would generate economic development was promoted by the Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, which claims that its HealthLine has stimulated billions in new development since it opened in 2008. Transit officials never mention that much of that development has been heavily subsidized.

The bus route traverses what the city calls the Health-Tech Corridor, which in addition to tax-increment financing offers tax abatements, low-interest loans, various job-creation incentives, and a variety of other subsidies. In all the city has spent at least $100 million in the corridor on top of the bus-rapid transit line. If asked, I imagine the transit agency would say it is only a coincidence that the bus route goes through this corridor. Continue reading