BRT not exactly working in Santiago
BRT is all the fad in South America, where projects such as the Transmilenio in Columbia and the RIT in Bogota, Brazil, have awakened the world to the possibility of improving transportation through the construction of rapid bus routes. For god's sake, as we've covered on this site, even New York City, home of the world's largest subway system, is getting into the game.
The simple fact is that BRT is a lot easier to implement than rail-based transit, because it can use existing roads and buses are a lot cheaper than trains. The problem, of course, is that if you don't pay enough attention to the details, BRT can really mess up. And become a major problem.
Santiago, Chile, which already has a relatively large metro system, has developed a new bus system called Transantiago. Basically, it replaced 3,000 bus companies with about 10 ones, all private, operating in a far more coordinated system. The only problem, as NPR reports, is that it's not working very well. Though it's an improvement over the old system, which was awful to the environment, using old buses, and which induced heavy traffic because of extreme competition between all the bus companies, this isn't exactly the best solution we've seen.
The city isn't exact ready for prime time, without the GPS devices on the buses found elsewhere, few dedicated bus lanes, which are essential for any BRT program, and an overall heavy reliance on the subway, which has increased traffic on that system by a monumental 1,000,000 a day!
What this story really points out to all of us is how tricky it may be to try to implement BRT, and how easy it is to mess up. BRT may seem like an easy and cheap replacement for trains, but it's not that simple.
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ysf | 11:40 PM |
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What's your source for the BRT-specific challenges, e.g. lack of dedicated bus lanes? We're in the middle of a bus v rail debate, and the debate is short on facts and long on faith.
The NPR article has a good overview of the situation, as does the (yes, I know) Wikipedia page.
