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Bus Rapid Transit: End of trend in Latin America?
- Darío Hidalgo, Ricardo Giesen, Juan Carlos Muñoz
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- Journal:
- Data & Policy / Volume 6 / 2024
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 11 January 2024, e2
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- Article
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Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has grown fast in the last 25 years, promising low-cost, rapid implementation, and large positive impacts. Despite advances, many systems in middle- and low-income countries face operational and financial issues, particularly in Latin America. Some practitioners, researchers, and decision makers, and the media are questioning its ability to provide quality services. Is this the end of a trend? To answer this question, this paper explores the status of the BRT industry and literature on the topic, with a focus on Latin America, as well as the emblematic cases of Curitiba, Quito, Bogotá, Mexico, and Santiago. Overcrowding, lack of reliability, fare evasion, issues of safety and security, and poor maintenance are evident problems in these and other cities. They seem to be a result of institutional and financial constraints, as well as technical limitations of surface-based transit modes. BRT has been able to deliver high-capacity and fast and reliable services, but requires permanent management and investment to face growing demand and aging infrastructure and vehicles, just like rail systems do. In addition, attention needs to be provided to data, technology innovation, urban integration, and public participation to keep BRT as an integral part of multimodal high-quality sustainable mobility networks in the future.
three - The path toward integrated systems
- Edited by Juan Carlos Munoz, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile Escuela de Ingenieria, Laurel Paget-Seekins, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile Escuela de Ingenieria
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- Book:
- Restructuring Public Transport through Bus Rapid Transit
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 10 January 2016, pp 31-50
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Summary
Introduction
The main goal of an urban transport system is to provide accessibility for the inhabitants of an urban region. As this book shows, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects can play an important role in urban mobility, but they cannot stand alone. A combination of different transport modes is needed to serve the demand which varies across different times and geographical areas of the region. Residents have to navigate the transport system to reach their destinations. The service they receive depends on the characteristics of each of the segments they must follow (including the access to and egress from public transport) and the experience of transfer between them. The system will provide a higher level of service to its users if it is designed for passengers to move between trip legs as smoothly as possible, and if they understand the system's inherent complexity so as to be able to find their best possible route choice (see Chapters Twelve and Thirteen). The more convenient transfer experiences are within the system as a whole (for example, no additional fare and a short walk), the better the use that passengers will make of the available network of services. Alternatively, passengers may avoid certain service combinations due to inconvenient transfer experiences. Thus, users (and therefore the urban region) will always benefit from offering an integrated system with seamless transfers.
An integrated network that provides seamless access between all points is ideal; however, this is a complicated undertaking, especially when the system is fragmented into different authorities or decision makers, or when the starting point is an informal bus network, as described in Chapter Four. In this chapter we discuss the challenges faced by two integration pathways – sudden and gradual – and suggest a framework for advancing public transport integration which mitigates the main issues observed in these cases. The framework is designed for implementing integrated public transport systems in a context where regulation is insufficient and multiple private operators are involved. We found that this context is quite common, particularly in developing countries.
The issue of public transport integration
Integration has been a recurring topic in transport policy. Preston (2012) traces back the policies for transport integration in the UK to 1947 and in Europe to 1952, but indicates that integration has proven hard to achieve in practice due to the difficulty of defining and operationalising integration.