Cities are queuing to get on board the bus rapid transit revolution

The late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher is reputed to have once said that anyone on a bus over the age of 25 is a failure. That stigma may have existed in the 1980s but now, thanks to bus rapid transit systems (BRT), the common omnibus has become an important market on the road towards a sustainable city.

The bus is the poor relation of public transport, slower than a train and less sexy that a tram with its overhead wires and clanking sounds resonant of a Raymond Chandler San Francisco novel.

But they are relatively cheap to build and so well placed to offer low-cost fares to city commuters in both the industrialised and developing worlds. And given that total transport emissions grew at an annual average rate of 1.7% — faster than any other sector except industry according to the International Energy Agency — they offer a smaller carbon footprint.

BRTs have been around since the town of Runcorn in Cheshire, England, built a 14-miles (22km) guided busway that opened in 1971 to take people to its central shopping centre. Some 50 years later. there are now an estimated 31.7 million people using more than 5,700km busways in 188 cities in six continents every day.

Where busways have been put down, they have made a huge difference. I experienced El Metropolitano in Lima, the heavily congested capital of Peru when I was there for the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund. Travelling from either the southern or north edge of the city, the bus whisked you to the historic city centre. Now 700,000 people a day use the 27km stretch.

Further to the north, the TransMilenio BRT in Bogota, Colombia, is the largest BRT in the world with 207km of busways. Indeed, most of the world’s BRTs are in Latin America, where about 19.6 million passengers ride every day.

Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania has 21 km of dedicated bus lanes with a DART bus fleet of 140 buses was extremely successful, cutting travel times by over 50 percent and serving approximately 200,000 people a day.

Seeing the ability of BRTs to deliver both economic and well as environmental benefits, the World Bank in 2017 provided $300 million for the Dakar Bus Rapid Transit Pilot (BRT) Project in Senegal. By shifting commuters out of fossil fuel-powered cars to electric over its lifetime, the BRT project will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 1.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, the bank says.

By offering some or all of exclusive bus lanes, frequent and fast service, fixed routes and stops, a modern vehicle fleet and dedicated stations, BRTs can be a genuinely more attractive alternative — both in terms of convenience and finance —to a private motor car.

The hope is that, just as developing countries such as Kenya used mobile phone technology to pioneer alternative banking solutions for farmers and others in remote locations, cities in low- and middle-income countries have a window of opportunity to leapfrog to low-carbon, efficient and inclusive urban transport.

Well-established cities in Europe where homes and businesses have created a network of ownership and occupation that makes it hard to build a new busway — think of the anger created by the now truncated High Speed 2 rail project’s building in inner London and across the midlands.

Transport for London has done the next best thing and created a network of 10 express bus routes between key outer London town centres and transport hubs. Called the Superloop, the routes make up an orbital network around the capital, with one route going from West Croydon to the West End with fewer stops, aimed to deliver faster journeys.

One study found that moving from traditional buses to BRT could increase the subjective well-being (SWB) for passengers while leading to the provision of more space for pedestrians and cyclists.

It may be less impactful and headline grabbing than wind and solar renewable energy generators, but expanding the networks of BRTs across major cities, especially in low- and middle-income countries, where the costs will be lower and the benefits more immediate, should get a green light from policymakers and investors.

Art can show us not just what our cities look like, but what they could become

Artists have always played a muti-layered role within cities: as recorders of its inhabitants, as users of its unloved quarters and as campaigners for a better urban environment. A new exhibition by the artist Ed Gray in Spitalfields captures that ongoing, positive process.

Cities have always attracted artists. The gathering of influential and wealthy people makes them potential markets. The diversity within the population and the range of physical and social environments throw up opportunities to record the events and people whether on canvas, sculpture or through sound and vision.

Often this lends itself to images that evoke the beauty of the city, such as Claude Monet’s impressionist oil paintings of Waterloo Bridge, including this sunset painting held by the National Gallery of Art in the US. The British rock bank The Kinks left their own take on that scene with the song Waterloo Sunset.

Artists are also well placed to record the more mundane reality of living in a city. The painter LS Lowry preserved the image of life in the industrial districts of the north west of England in the first half of the last century. This factory-scape sold for £2.65 million at auction in 2020. Again a musical take, by artists Bryan and Michael who secured a number one with Matchstalk Men & Matchstalk Cats & Dogs, burnt the memory onto a new generation.

When artists find that the grim actuality of daily life in the city is actually harming its citizens, they are often motivated to use their skills to put these manifest injustices in front of the eyes of both the public and politicians.

One of the most famous British purveyors of that style is William Hogarth, whose satirical work included representations of the South Sea Bubble financial crisis, the fate of a young country girl fatally pulled into prostitution in London, and nefarious political practices around elections in the so-called Rotten Boroughs (An Election Entertainment can be seen at London’s Royal Academy).

He also used his painting to highlight animal cruelty and most famously, perhaps, the rising problem of alcoholism. His drawings Beer Lane and Gin Lane, which shows a drunk women letting her baby fall to its death, was published in support of the Gin Act of 1751 that banned gin distillers selling to unlicensed merchants.

An artist with a current small exhibition in London is Ed Gray, who says he draws on Lowry and Hogarth as well as on William Blake, Titian and Beryl Cook among many others. He has produced a large volume of street scenes of London (as well as other cities and regions around the world).

I was fortunate enough to attend one of his tours of recent work in a 1705 former Huguenot home off Brick Lane in Spitalfields called the House of Annetta, which is now a centre for research, arts and solidarity work.

Although Gray has painted hundreds of pictures of London, the show focuses on a series of paintings portraying events in the city had a major impact at the time and whose effects will likely linger through the years.

One of the star attractions of the show called Scenes of Innocence & Experience — a reference to Blake — was a visualisation of a clash between protectors campaigning for and against Brexit. It captures elements of that fierce debate, with flags, posters, fancy dress and guest appearances by Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and the English Defence League. The piece is, however, balanced.

Others in the series include Ode to Torsion, St Thomas’s Hospital that encapsulates the strain that the National Health Service has been under intense stress from Covid-19, underfunding and industrial action. Another features the mayhem, sometime funny but also occasionally threatening, outside Wembley Stadium ahead of the UEFA Euro 2020 final.

The positively of his paintings lie in the diversity of the characters involved and emotions that they can convey, as well as the way that they use humour and caricature to highlight the symptoms of our modern urban lifestyle. They also succeed in combining a personal subjective experience of the city with links towards important local and national political issues.

As one observer of East End life, Spitalfieldslife.com, has put it, Gray’s work captures the tumultuous street life of the capital superlatively as his images include scores of diverse characters that “delight in the multiple dramas of daily existence”. Pictures are also an immediately accessible format in a way that a peer-reviewed journal can never be. (The show continues until 6 November.)

Artists cannot create sustainable cities but by focusing on the realities of city life and the way that their governance systems desperately need improvement, they can show not just how cities are, but what they could be with a bit more tender loving care.

Today’s cities still buffeted by an old trade winds story

The fact that eastern districts of former industrial cities such as London, Bristol, Paris and New York tend to be poorer than their western neighbours has been well-observed for some time. But the fact that those east ends still lag behind is a reminder that urban development often leaves marginalised groups worse off.

Thanks to academic research, we now say for sure it was the factory smoke and odours blown east by the trade winds during the industrial era that made those areas less attractive to live in and thus to be shunned by the wealthier.

While that might be no surprise, the research is interesting because, as the authors note, those effects “are still felt to the modern day” even now that deindustrialisation has meant that industrial pollution no longer blows across the city.

Although the lack of industrial pollution no longer determines the siting of residential developments for different income groups, the legacy of that now-absent pollution is still relevant in current times because, as the authors point out, they

Deindustrialisation means that factory chimney snoke no longer divides the city but as areas such as the East End of London is still less highly valued than the West End, inequalities can still be found in the way modern cities are built.

Different forces are at play in cities in both the advanced world and in emerging and developing economies. For instance, the Texan city of Austin put in a strategy to make itself a sustainable city that balanced the need for economic growth with demands be more environmentally conscious.

It certainly appeared to pay off with strong rates of economic growth delivered at a tie of repeated recessions in the United States and several awards for the city’s environmental performance included being selected the Greenest City in America by MSN and number one in renewable energy sales by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

But as one of several studies found, the developments that were agreed with the city authorities focused on downtown areas of the city that led to the marginalisation of working class minorities in East Austin, the homeless, and African-American communities, many of whom were concentrated in the downtown and were displaced from the central areas of the city.

One depressing finding was that despite seeing more than 20% population growth rate between 2000 and 2010, Austin witnessed a 5.4% decrease in its African-American population. The author says that the “Black Flight” from the northern sections of East Austin was “particularly alarming”.

Finding such as these has led to emergence of the idea of environmental racism, as part of the development of a city. This not so much simply racist acts directed at non-white people — although that certainly happens — but the idea that that people of colour are disproportionately exposed to a particular set of environmental hazards, not as the result of any single decision or particular act but because of an unspoken organising system – what in the UK we might call institutional racism.

Instead, they are the result of urban development in a highly racialised society over the course of 150 years, as one study of Los Angeles found. Most industrial hazards in southern California were concentrated in the greater central and southern part of Los Angeles County which is inhabited by people of colour.

Overall, the worry is that there is a notion of urbanisation produced in unequal spaces where some groups are more exposed to environmental risk.

In the global South the outcome can be even more extreme. In Indian cities, research has shown that the poor tend to be pushed into areas where there's less access to open resources and environmental risk is more predominant.

For example, in a large unplanned area of peri-urban Delhi, shanty households are unconnected to the city’s main water network, public water supply is characterised by ad hoc inadequate provision, which compounded by rent-seeking middlemen and political calculation.

The burden of dealing with this reality often falls on the women of the household who not only have to fetch the water but as well as a lot of different tasks which involve water usage such as cleaning clothes, doing the dishes or cleaning the house or cooking are feminised tasks.

The type of analysis, which is known in the trade as urban political ecology, does a good job of stripping away some of the varnish around the idea of sustainability, ad discussed in a previous blog.

Combatting it will involve ensuring that all segments of a city’s society are brought into the discussion about its development. But doing that will be much easier said than done.