Bus rapid transit

Summary

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is public transportation by bus that is intended to provide a faster more reliable and more comfortable journey for passengers than conventional bus services. It is intended to provide the passenger with ride quality equivalent to that of rail services but with lower construction and operating costs. In order to provide a faster journey time, road space is allocated to give priority to BRT vehicles, often via a combination of guideways and/or busways (e.g., a continuous conventional bus lane, or provision for trolley buses with over head wiring). Both allow for exclusive use of the road space by buses. Bus services running on guideways (often known as “Guided Buses”) employ advances in technology to achieve the ride quality of rail services, with guidewheels on the buses effectively “latching on” to the guideway and taking the steering away from the driver. However, merely providing a guideway does not imply a BRT system. Similarly, overhead wiring that allows trolley buses to operate does not make a BRT system on its own. A BRT system also requires bus priority at junctions, stop and station design more closely approximating those associated with rail travel, and other attributes of a high quality rapid service, e.g., real time information and a limited number of stops. It is also common for BRT systems to only operate on radial routes in and out of town and city centres. Given the fixed routes BRT systems operate over, it is also common for the system to include feeder services. Where the BRT system utilises trolley buses or other vehicles that can only operate on the BRT route (this might include articulated buses in some cities whose road networks cannot accommodate such vehicles in most places), separate bus services will link residential areas into the BRT network. Where a BRT system uses guided buses, which are conventional buses with the addition of guidewheels (i.e., they can operate anywhere in the town or city), several different buses services may use the guideway and integrate the ‘feeder service’ into the BRT service. Fro example a bus may make several stops within a residential area before joining the guideway and making a rapid journey in to the city centre.