Reinventing buses for rapid transit

ASIA FILE

As Jakarta plans a $400-million underground mass transit railway to cope with its increasingly unruly road traffic, Bangkok gets ready to begin operating a 21-km subway this April, supplementing its 23-km elevated Skytrain, and Shanghai goes ahead with plans to build 11 new metro lines and 10 light rail corridors in the next 25 years, Manila thinks it has found a less costly, but equally effective, solution to its urban mass transit problems.

It's betting on buses, but these would be new-generation buses, or rather bus-trains linked in units of threes or fours, with dedicated corridors running along a 22-mile highway, known as C-5, that surrounds the city.

There will be 110 of these buses initially, with low-floors for easy entry and exit, moving at a uniform speed and stopping only at designated stations.

If things go as planned, Manila will have its first bus rapid transit (BRT) system, called Philtrack, in operation by early 2005. Its cost? A highly manageable $ 91 million.

BRT is the big, new concept in urban transport and has come to be introduced in a number of cities around the world in the past three years, including Honolulu, Los Angeles, Miami, Pittsburgh, Ottawa and Vancouver in North America.

In Asia, BRT systems are either in operation or are in an advanced stage of development in Akita, Fukuoka, Gifu, Kanazawa, Miyazaki, Nagaoka, Nagoya and Nigata in Japan, and Kunming, Shanghai and Beijing in China.

A pilot bus corridor will be in operation in Beijing by early next year. The Chinese capital, with a population of 14 million regulars and four million floaters and over two million motorised and 12 million non-motorised vehicles, is determined to have an extensive BRT network on the ground before the 2008 Olympic Games come crashing down on it.

Anticipating that BRTs are going to be popular and must soon move to a higher level of technical innovation, Toyota Motor Corporation has laid out a one-mile test track in Shizuoka, where it's trying out what it calls an intelligent multi-mode transit system (IMTS) to meet the needs of an increasingly urbanising world.

IMTS mechanically links up to six low-floor buses, fuelled by liquefied natural gas, moving in platoon formation on dedicated roads. The lane is maintained by the detection of magnetic nails, and radar monitors warn of forward obstructions.

Inspired by the great BRT success story of Curitiba, Brazil, town planners believe bus-based systems, merged with today's intelligent transport technologies, are able to offer high-quality, state-of-the-art rapid transit even in crowded cities, at a fraction of the cost of other options.

The system calls for segregated busways that can be either along the curbs or in the centre of the right of way, or even configured as contra-flow lanes. Its attraction lies in the fact that it's more flexible than the light railway. Buses can be routed in a way that transfers can be eliminated.

Boarding access is easier than in the case of light railway transits (LRTs). Stations are handier. Signal prioritisation keeps the buses moving while technology helps maintain more consistent distances between them.

Passengers know when the next bus is arriving. Prepaid or electronic passes can make fare collection convenient and rapid. Which is why BRT is considered as good as a light railway in both performance and appeal.

The biggest attraction, of course, is the significantly lower cost factor. It ranges from $ 200,000 a mile for an arterial street-based system to $ 55 million a mile for a dedicated busway system.

The average, according to the US Government Accounting Office, is around $ 13.5 million a mile. By comparison, a light railway system, depending on its complexity, could cost anything from $ 12.4 million to $ 118.8 million a mile.

When Curitiba implemented its BRT in the early 1970s, the cost was $ 2 million a mile. It was laid out as a spider-web-like network of five main arterial roads with bus-only lanes, connected by concentric circles of local bus lines.

Today, 70 per cent of Curitiba's 3 million people ride buses to work or home, although the city has one of the highest percentages of car ownership in Brazil.

There's a bus almost every minute; stations are attractive, made of Plexiglass tubes; tickets are prepaid; waiting time is negligible; connections don't fail; and just one fare allows over 40 miles worth of travel. With 700 miles of bus routes, of which 40 miles are dedicated, the pain has almost gone out of Curitiba's daily mass transit.

The system works so well that the city's growth pattern has changed. All major residential and commercial developments in the past 30 years have taken place along the five arterial bus routes, giving the city a greater urban balance.

There's something else one should know about Curitiba's BRT. Its operation is entirely financed by passenger fares. It doesn't need any subsidies.