Down with the BRT, long live the Bus

Why Bus Rapid Transit is a failed planning concept

Let’s start by being very clear and, for once, not cautiously nuanced: Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is a planning concept we should abandon for good. I say it and I mean it. Why? Despite its promoters' best intentions, I believe it has done more harm than good to the cause of better bus service, notably in North America. For instance, it has implicitly promoted the idea that better buses, that is, buses that run faster and on time, thanks to priority measures, can’t happen without a heavy infrastructure approach akin to rail-based transit. As a result, it has again reinforced the idea that there should be a (socially) tiered transit system. On the one hand, the infrastructure-heavy and capital-intensive rail modes and BRT (a bus cosplaying as rail) cater to the choice-riders. On the other hand, the humble regular bus, a zero-infrastructure endeavor that still operates today like it did fifty years ago, responding to the mobility needs of those with no choice, aka the “captive rider.”

But what the heck is this Bus Rapid Transit, anyway?

But let’s start this pamphlet by returning to the fundamentals: what is a BRT, anyway? It is not uncommon in the policy sphere to get involved in never-ending discussions about whether a particular project can qualify as a “proper” BRT, as we try to measure the gap between the real-life application and some supposedly “inherent” characteristics of this planning concept. In a very American definition-obsessed fashion, the ITDP even invented a scorecard to classify the BRT-ness of a project. But does it matter if a project meets a bronze or a gold-standard BRT score? Is making the TRUE, REAL, CERTIFIED, BEAUTIFUL BRT the goal of our planning effort? Planners are not theologians, and they shouldn’t discuss the very nature of BRT the way Christian theologians discuss the gender of angels, as an abstract debate trying to make a moral sense of the discrepancies between the real world and the one depicted in a sacred book. Like any ontological debate, the debate about what a “real” BRT is is potentially endless and, frankly, useless and misleading, but one we seem to get stuck in as a profession.

The BEAUTIFUL, TRUE, CERTIFIED, 10-years-in-the-making multi-million (but still lacking absolute signal priority) Pie IX BRT in Montréal.

Prisoners of our own concepts.

There is an inherent risk in norming a planning concept and reducing it to a rigorously defined canon, by describing (and prescribing) its apparent characteristics minutely, as the North American planning practice tends to do as a form of comfort and professional assurance. There is value in organizing knowledge by developing concepts. Still, the risk is that we become prisoners of our concepts and forget the fundamentals, that is, the real-life problems that led to the development of a certain artefact that we named BRT ex-post. As a consequence, we lose track of what really matters.

These three little letters are meant to identify some features that distinguish a bus service that is different from the “vanilla” one. A bus service that is faster and capable of carrying a higher number of riders, something we claim regular buses cannot do by excluding them from the “mass” transit category. In contemporary transit planning discourse, BRT is the little spell that magically transforms our Cinderella Bus into a Pretty Princess Bus, which can sit at the table of the steel-wheeled, blue-blooded forms of mass transit. But is BRT the only or the most effective framework for delivering better quality bus service? As you may imagine, my answer is an uncompromised “HELL NO!”.

A bit of history.

But first, a bit of history. While North America was giving up on its early postwar experiments in bus priority to instead double down on its commitment to eviscerating its own cities to make way for mass automobility, South America was developing its first BRT of many to follow in Curitiba in the 1970s, as a way to cheaply structure around transit the growth of then rapidly expanding cities in a context of fiscal austerity, similarly to what the cities of industrialized nations have been doing around rail transit since the end of the 19^th century. Meanwhile, European cities confronted with growing traffic and reduced bus performance were developing less iconic but quite effective strategies to keep surface transit competitive in the growingly congested streets of their pre-car cities. Starting from the 1970s, Bern, Zurich, Bologna, Munich, Besançon, Lyon, Almere, Oxford, and countless others countered surface transit performance degradation by developing broad transit priority policies embedded in traffic management strategies and urban planning visions, not just on a few corridors but at the city’s or even regional scales.

Unfortunately, these broader strategies are hard to condense into a catchy acronym and to deliver via a single project. They don’t produce iconic artefacts like the estação tubo. As a result, they got little or no attention at all from the usual global policy brokers, such as academics in English-speaking institutions and North-to-South policy knowledge networks like the World Bank, UN Habitat, and the World Cities Forum, but rather circulated nationally or at best regionally, for example via the low-profile soft networks of politically like-minded municipal socialism that mostly fall under high-flying North American the radar. As a result, they never made it into the APTAs, the NACTOs, the APAs, and the other policy-setting circles where Canadian and American planners share ideas and keep in touch with the profession's advances. It took until the early 2000s for American academia to show interest in the best-known example of a comprehensive transit priority policy, Zurich. So far, it remains a pretty isolated effort by a single person, with little translation into diffused actionable professional knowledge, let alone policy wisdom available to generalist decision-makers.

Even if the idea of BRT was born in South America, it has become a global staple after being adopted by the powerful American idea-brokering machine, in a typical process of yielding ideas in the South, polishing and repackaging them in the “Anglo North Core”, and then resell them back in the South, a process well described by researchers for things such as microcredit and participative budgeting (https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety/article/39/1/1/6403955). Once properly formalized and branded, the BRT concept has made its way back into the so-called Global South, but also into developed countries with a cultural affinity, such as the Netherlands, or ones with a deep cultural inferiority complex toward everything coming from the anglosphere, such as Italy. In my home country, BRT, or better e-BRT projects have been very popular in recent calls for grants, especially from cities with a history of weak and inconsistent transit planning and a love for gadgetbahns, such as Bari, Genoa, Naples, Catania, Perugia. To local policymakers, this exotic-sounding three-letters English acronym bears the promise of a miracle solution, more flexible and less disruptive to build compared to rail-based transit, that can eventually be watered down whenever opposition to priority measures inconveniencing cars arise, while still having the government footing the bill because it’s legally considered a “mass transit project”, unlike regular bus priority measures.

BRT as a likeable marketing product.

The success of the BRT concept in the English-speaking transit planning and policy discourse during the last 20 years is undeniable. It’s a global success actively promoted by powerful global policy-setters and increasingly by global consultancy firms, eager to sell an expensive turn-key solution to bus transit woes. The reason for this success is that the BRT is a perfectly likeable marketing product: anyone can see it through their own preferences and get the flavor of BRT that best suits their worldview. It’s as cool as Light Rail, so it caters to choice riders, but allegedly easier, cheaper and faster to build (Montréal’s 15-year-in-the-making-and-$50-million-per-km SRB Pie-IX would like a word). North Americans advocating for better transit are disillusioned that they will ever see rail-based rapid transit at scale, or generalized improvements to the bus service, and see it as a good enough substitute. Anti-public spending New Right policy wonks a la Chicago School see it as the fiscally responsible transit solution for the city-to-suburb commute as opposed to the definitionally boondoggle heavy rail. Parts of the Left and the Greens see it as the unionized labor-intensive, locally grown, organic form of rapid transit. Urban development promoters see BRT as the affordable streetcar for the 2020s. Urbanists and bike advocates see it as an opportunity to shoehorn complete street approaches at scale. Municipal engineers and DOT folks hope it will pay for utility reconstruction and corridor-wide road improvement schemes without using highway dollars or property taxes. Finally, BRT is cool because it can be everything you like; it’s the Keanu Reeves of rapid transit. Importantly, it’s cool because it makes better bus service Instagrammable: you can take nice pictures of it, showing the fancy, fully accessorized stops, the special-livery buses with USB chargers, and the glossy, red-painted lanes. This is something you can’t do with the humble, boring and hard-to-picture work of rethinking time allocation at intersections or neighbourhood-level traffic patterns and other non-visible priority interventions.

BRT or nothing?

The perverse effect of the BRT concept's popularity is that it seems that effective bus priority measures can be implemented only as part of a multi-million BRT “mega-project” that takes a decade to plan and build and is often burdened with ancillary scopes such as utility reconstruction, road widening, and the compulsory complete street redesign that make the bill balloon to several dozens of million per kilometre. On the other hand, the rest of the bus network is often neglected, following the binary all-or-nothing approach to improving bus service that I mentioned at the beginning.

In private conversations with people involved in bus priority projects in Montréal, I have been told multiple times that the only two options explored are reversible peak-only curbside lanes interrupted at each right turn or full-scale BRT. Nothing in between. Apparently, painting center-running lanes, building a bunch of island platforms and reconfiguring a few traffic lights, all things that the city could plan and deliver on its own, would immediately qualify the project as a SRB (Service Rapide par Bus, the Québecois acronym for BRT), moving it into the bureaucratic pipeline of major projects falling under ARTM’s and Provincial PQI (the multi-year capital spending plan) jurisdiction, immediately making it into a dollar-burning, consulting firms bonanza multi-year planning process.

However, bus priority measures exist on a continuum, from light infrastructure interventions as simple and discrete as bus bulbs and moving stops after intersections to fully grade-separated transitways. It makes no sense to draw an arbitrary legal threshold separating basic transit priority measures from a thing called “BRT.” Confining the use of center-running dedicated bus lanes to BRT projects because building a simple island bus stop suddenly makes them belong to a premium category of bus priority measures is silly. Still, this artificial threshold between BRT and non-BRT exists in many countries and shapes many bad planning decisions, often induced by the opportunity of pocketing federal or provincial funding dedicated to large infrastructure projects.

Moreover, there are system-wide organizational and soft infrastructure measures that deliver more significant advantages to all transit users and operators than a full-fledged BRT at a fraction of the cost, such as generalized all-door boarding, proof-of-payment and stop consolidation that are neglected because of their real or perceived political cost but also because they do not fall into the procedural sandbox of a project. Finally, the corridor- and project-based approaches promoted by the implicit association of heavy transit priority with BRT projects are also why the North American road engineering practice struggles to even conceive of circulation-based approaches to transit priority, that is, approaches based on shaping traffic flows and thinking of bus priority as a component of general traffic planning at the neighborhood or city-wide level.

Even more frustrating is that BRT implementation in North America often lacks key components for effective, rapid, and reliable transit, such as absolute Transit Signal Priority (TSP). Cities that don’t build BRT but care about transit performance, like many Swiss, German, French and Dutch cities, have TSP as a built-in feature in most intersections. Watering down TSP, a key component of transit priority efforts, is unsurprising in a continent that regularly fails to give effective signal priority to mass rail transit, like the multi-billion-dollar Los Angeles LRTs and Toronto Eglinton LRT.

Unsurprisingly, BRT design guidelines published by several North American agencies spend dozens of pages and polished renderings on wayfinding, station art, greenery and “distinctive architecture” but often not a word on how to effectively implement TSP, which is way easier said than done and a way more crucial component of an effective bus service users can rely upon. And this all while the conventional humble bus stop, where most bus riders will start their journey, looks like a flimsy sign on a crumbling pavement, and a “no-parking” sign as the only thing standing between it and curb encroachment.

Let’s go back to the fundamentals.

If we agree to abandon BRT as a helpful planning concept, how should we better organize our thinking about any effort to improve bus service? Let’s go back to the fundamentals. We all love some fancy bus stops with distinctive architecture, USB chargers, and a bit of art, but the fundamental factor that makes it or breaks it for current and prospective bus users is a very simple one: time. The time it takes for a user to go from A to B, including waiting times, how much this time varies depending on exogenous factors such as traffic and crowding and the time of the day and week the service is available. In technical terms, it means that we need to go back to the four pillars of transit service planning:

- Average speed. We should establish a target commercial speed that aligns with the best comparable international examples. Cheering about the efficacy of bus priority measures because they improve over an often-catastrophic situation is not a good way of evaluating planning decisions.

- Regularity. Aiming at high levels of regularity (i.e., > 90-ish % on-time performances with reasonable timetable padding and consistent travel times) is as important a target as absolute speed. Predictable travel times consistent throughout the day mean that users can rely on the service and plan their daily mobility around it, and operators can reduce padding in the schedule using their scarce resources more efficiently.

- Frequency. There is no need to describe this. We all know that frequency is freedom, and waiting times are a key component of overall trip times, especially in multi-modal trips with multiple connections.

- Service Span. An extended regular service span, at least 20 hours/day, is key to making bus service attractive to diverse groups of users and for the complex mobility chains that characterize modern lifestyles.

The driving planning question for any bus improvement exercise is: how do we deliver a bus service that is as fast, regular, frequent, and extended as possible within a given urban context and with the resources we have or think we can convince decision-makers to provide? Any transit priority policy should first be grounded in analyzing real-life problems rather than back-justified to support a pre-packaged turn-key solution, as is often the case.

An honest, well-intentioned planning exercise should start from a simple but fundamental question: where and how are my buses, all of them, getting “delayed” compared to what best practices elsewhere achieve? Is it how we handle the process of boarding and alighting? Then, the answer is a generalized adoption at the network level of buses with more and larger doors, all-door boarding, proof-of-payment, and low-floor buses and better-designed stops. Are there a few ill-conceived nodes where my buses go through, causing the most delays and irregularities? If yes, let’s tackle this problem with extensive intersection redesign, signal priority, or grade separation when inevitable. Do my buses get delayed because of how we handle priority via signaled intersections on gridded street networks without clear priority axes? In that case, we may need a much more thorough, area-wide reform of traffic philosophy via circulation plans. Is the problem an untenable level of background traffic resulting in constant blocking-the-box that makes reserved lanes and TSP useless (Hello NYC)? So maybe area-wide policies to curb background traffic, such as Limited Traffic Areas or Congestion Pricing, are the first step to keep my buses moving. Is it a problem of hard-to-suppress curbside activity? So maybe median or contraflow bus lanes are the answer. The toolbox is rich, and we can achieve remarkable improvements with a smart and wisely planned combination of global and local solutions that can be implemented progressively over time, with some necessary room for trial and error and some good old learning-by-doing of local institutions.

Projects or Policies?

I understand that today’s politicians love projects. Policies, Programs, Plans and other long-term coordinated efforts have fallen out of fashion in the era of vanishing government capacity and on-demand expertise. BRT is an appealing concept for decision-makers who want to improve bus service and, at the same time, are teased by the idea that they can purchase a finished, turn-key solution for it, the same way they bought a finished house or their last car. Not to mention the multiple financing announcements and first-shovel and ribbon-cutting photo opportunities that infrastructure projects bring. However, politicians who care not only about consensus (which should be a means, not an end) but also about policy outcomes should relearn to love and nurture the capacity of the government to carry out long-term programs made of diffused interventions and non-Instagrammable immaterial operational changes. A comprehensive transit priority policy is a difficult, long-term commitment, often a politically tricky one that is sometimes hard to sell in our distracted, superficial, anti-technocratic contemporary zeitgeist. However, this approach can yield more significant, durable benefits for our buses than a hundred BRT projects.

As a final clarification, the goal of this post is not to police the language of decision-makers and planners or to dismiss an entire concept or idea just for the sake of contrarianism. I am in no way against any form of bus-dedicated heavy infrastructure rights-of-way, even ones of rail-level quality, such as Canadian transitways and Dutch Busbaanen, which often predate the diffusion of the BRT concept and arose from the necessity of delivering a more performing bus service in sprawling suburbanizing cities. I never hid that I prefer the more nuanced French BHNS concept (Bus à Haut Niveau de Service – Bus with High Level of Service or BHLS), mostly because of its less dogmatic implementation, better cost-control and fine-tuning to the needs of medium-demand corridors within a generally good quality long-term planning framework, including diffused transit priority interventions and a developed understanding of circulation-based priority.

The toolbox of effective transit priority is vast and rich, and worth exploring and experimenting with. It can’t be contained within the narrow concept of BRT, intended as the go-to medicine to revive our moribund bus service. If we feel pressured to adopt a catchy acronym, we can call it BBE, Better Buses Everywhere, or whatever fancier name a lavishly paid communication consultant can come up with. The important thing is that we get the process of thinking about improving bus performance right, by understanding the fundamentals and mobilizing the right mix of instruments from the global policy toolbox.

That’s why I say: Down with the BRT, but long live the bus (priority)!