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.

Don’t forget that many major cities in the developed world, including New York, Chicago, St. Louis, London, and Paris were optimally designed for walking and transit when the first low-cost automobiles appeared. Residents of those cities didn’t say, “We don’t need cars when we have such excellent transit systems.” Instead, the majority bought cars and drive for most of their travel. Inner-city populations declined and mobility increased as both jobs and residents moved to the suburbs in large numbers.

People were right to buy cars. Even in the New York urban area, the most transit-intensive region of the United States, the average resident can reach about as many jobs in a 20-minute auto trip as a 40-minute transit trip and four to fourteen times as many jobs by auto as by transit in trips of the same length of time. There is no ideal combination of urban design and urban transit that will grant people as much mobility as they can enjoy with an automobile.

Yet this affirms the use of bus-rapid transit over rail transit in developing cities. Such cities are bound to undergo dramatic changes in transportation patterns as new job centers open up, people move to new residential areas, and transportation technologies change. This means it is short-sighted to saddle such cities with the high cost of rail systems that aren’t likely to connect most residents with jobs a few years from now.

However, when transportation officials talk about “taking cars off the road” or, worse, preventing them from ever owning cars, they are effectively relegating large numbers of urban residents to poverty. The automobile is a key to reducing poverty, and if it has negative effects on air quality or climate, it would be better to treat those emissions than to try to discourage driving.

Air pollution in Cario, Egypt. Photo courtesy of Kim Eun Yeul/World Bank.

The World Bank report is accompanied by the above photo of air pollution in Cairo, Egypt. Such images were common in the United States 50 years ago but are rare today thanks to emissions control technologies that have reduced toxic emissions from highway vehicles by 90 percent despite a tripling of miles of driving since 1970. Some cars emit so little air pollution that the Environmental Protection Agency classifies them as “super ultra low emissions vehicles” because the produce 90 percent less emissions than the average new car, which in turn is 90 percent cleaner than the average car of 53 years ago.

So trying to get people to drive less isn’t the only way to reduce emissions. The World Bank wants to encourage electric buses to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but that only works if the electricity is generated in ways that don’t emit greenhouse gases. To the extent that it is, electric cars can do the same thing and more fuel-efficient cars can reduce emissions even if the electrical generation plants are powered by fossil fuels.

In short, the World Bank is right to see bus-rapid transit as a superior substitute for rail transit. It is wrong to see it as a superior substitute for auto driving. Most residents of developing countries probably already know that automobiles provide them with better mobility, so the goal should be to make automobiles cleaner and greener, not to try to deny people access to that mobility.