3 results
Bus Rapid Transit: End of trend in Latin America?
- Darío Hidalgo, Ricardo Giesen, Juan Carlos Muñoz
-
- Journal:
- Data & Policy / Volume 6 / 2024
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 11 January 2024, e2
-
- Article
-
- You have access Access
- Open access
- HTML
- Export citation
-
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.
eighteen - Managing drivers and vehicles for cost-effective operations in regulated transit 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
-
- Book:
- Restructuring Public Transport through Bus Rapid Transit
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 10 January 2016, pp 337-354
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
In deregulated transport systems, operation is often based on multiple owners of a few vehicles each providing transport services. This usually leads to on-street competition between operators to attract demand, yielding severe traffic congestion and unsafe conditions for both passengers and drivers. Through the formalisation of the industry into a few firms operating larger fleets that are required to satisfy minimum standards, the system drastically reduces these externalities. In this process, to stay in the market, firms must manage their fleet and drivers efficiently and with fewer degrees of freedom than when a firm handled just a few buses. Public transport formalisation leads to policies to meet specific levels of service, vehicle regulations and contractual conditions for workers that should be satisfied by operators, whether they are public or private agencies. Thus, formalisation usually increases operational costs (see Chapters Three and Four), increasing the fare or the subsidies needed to finance the system. However, transit formalisation also opens the door to the implementation of operational research techniques in order to optimise planning and operation of transport systems to achieve a more cost-effective network. These techniques can also be applied in already formal public transport systems.
Under large operations, attractive and flexible solutions for these planning and operational problems are much less apparent, and their impact can be huge in contrast with decisions based on very simple rigid rules. Also, these big firms reach the economic scale at which they can invest in management support tools that could improve their performance. Cost savings usually amount to around 10% of operational costs while providing similar or better service to users.
The main aspects of transit operations that operational research tools can address are the vehicles and drivers. Their associated decisions can be structured into strategic (long term), tactic (medium term) and operational (short term) planning stages (see Ibarra-Rojas et al 2015). The cost involved in providing a BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) service can be structured similarly – that is, by respectively structuring (i) the infrastructure of the streets that the bus takes and the bus stations, (ii) buses and technology systems and (iii) daily bus operations and maintenance and drivers’ wages.
seventeen - BRRT: adding an R for reliability
- Edited by Juan Carlos Munoz, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile Escuela de Ingenieria, Laurel Paget-Seekins, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile Escuela de Ingenieria
-
- Book:
- Restructuring Public Transport through Bus Rapid Transit
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 10 January 2016, pp 317-336
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
To achieve high satisfaction indicators, a public transport system needs to provide a high level of service to its users. A high level of service not only requires that users experience low waiting times, fast travel times, and a minimum comfort standard, but also that this service is reliable – that is, it does not change significantly from day to day. These expectations explain some of the success of heavy rail systems around the world. However, heavy rail has a high infrastructure cost, ranging between US$70 and US$350 million per kilometre (Wright and Hook 2007). This cost makes rail an unattractive alternative for corridors with passenger demand under 20,000 passengers per direction per hour, and makes it very often too expensive for most developing countries. These are precisely the countries where demand for public transport is high.
To overcome these problems, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has arisen as an alternative to rail potentially offering the same level of service at a reduced cost. BRT bases most of its high level of service on rapidness. The Rapid in BRT stands for both the speed of the buses and their frequency. High frequencies create shorter trip times and higher capacity. This reduces waiting times and improves comfort, two critical elements of the level of service perceived by users. In the developed world, low frequency services (fewer than six buses per hour) are often operated with schedules. Under this scheme, passengers may experience not just a low wait time, but a reliable service. However, operating a medium or high frequency service on a timetable is not only challenging, but also inefficient since cycle times would be increased by extra travel times needed for buses to reach control points on schedule. Thus, most BRT services commit to an average frequency, not a schedule. Even though segregated lanes help isolate bus operations from general traffic, BRTs operation is still affected by traffic signals and demand fluctuations. It is well known that such perturbations affect the regularity of bus headways, inducing what is called bus bunching, where buses travel together. This phenomenon happens because buses trailing a longer than average headway get more loaded than usual, and therefore run more slowly than the average bus.