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.