Can BRT Encourage Bike Use?
by Jesse Fox, Tel Aviv, Israel on 02. 3.08
A feeder bus (left) and a bicycle parking lot (right) - two free ways to access Bogota's Transmilenio BRT system.
This is so much more advanced and hi-tech than anything I've ever seen in the US.
Another great short film from the folks at StreetsBlog, this time about Bogotá's flagship BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) project, the Transmilenio. Moving 1.3 million people a day through the city, the Transmilenio is the centerpiece of the urban revolution that has occurred in Bogotá, Colombia over the past several years.
A bus that functions like a subway: Quick floor-level boarding (right) at a Transmilenio station in Bogotá.
One interesting aspect of the Transmilenio explored in the movie is its feeder lines. While red buses circulate along main arteries, smaller green buses circulate in the neighborhoods, picking up passengers for free and feeding them into the main stations. Making feeder buses free (while still recognizing the need for easy access to stations) gave the city a serious incentive to pave bike paths to stations. After all, every twenty or so people who bike to the Transmilenio equal one less green feeder bus that the city needs to operate.
Today, Bogotá is one of the most bike-friendly cities in South America. In addition to paving bike paths, the city set up large, clean and free bicycle storage facilities at the stations, giving people even more incentive to do the first part of their journey to work on two wheels.
Transmilenio is one of the best things that we've had in the last 10 years.
Watch the film here.
this is extremely cool. :)
This is wonderful!
Here in Sydney (Australia), the government would have us believe that the bus is one of those things we in the supposedly 1st world have to aspire toward. As for bikes... They should be (and often are) run off the road. There are almost no safe places to ride bikes - except in a few parks - where "toys" belong.
It's true - there really ARE revolutionaries in South America!
Viva la Revolution!
I wonder if the good people of Bogota would consider coming for a holiday to Sydney?
This works fine... in countries with 10-15% car ownership and little suburban sprawl. You don't have the urban layout to support bus 'rapid transit' in most of the first world, and you have such high land prices that it's generally negligibly different in cost (over the long term) to build trains.
It would be silly to build new oil-consuming transit when we know oil isn't getting cheap anytime soon. Electric rail is the way to go - hasn't Europe already made this obvious? The operating costs of buses vastly outstrip the operating costs of rail, and that difference pays off the capital cost of the infrastructure in a matter of decades.