Thursday, March 14, 2013

Eric Goldwyn on the Limits of BRT

Bus Rapid Transit is great, and I largely support BRT efforts around the globe. But as Columbia University Urban Planning PhD candidate (and my co-author on other work) Eric Goldwyn argues at The Atlantic Cities, BRT is subject to technological fetishism just like other transport modes. Drawing on research he did in Cape Town he concludes:
BRT has great potential to revolutionize the image and efficacy of public transport in the 21st century, but officials need to show greater sensitivity to city-specific context rather than chasing a technological ideal. What worked in Bogota is not working in Cape Town. Public transportation riders will be better served when their public servants continuously monitor, revisit, and tweak these new systems.
In other BRT news, Streetsblog Chicago interviewed Walter Hook of ITDP about ITDP's BRT scoring system to hopefully correct some of the problems discussed by Eric Goldwyn.

2 comments:

Nathan Landau said...

The typical problem in the US is almost precisely the opposite--underbuilt systems that do little or nothing to get the "BRT" bus out of regular traffic, and not surprisingly don't perform well.

Nathan Landau said...

The typical problem in the US is almost precisely the opposite--underbuilt systems that do little or nothing to get the "BRT" bus out of regular traffic, and not surprisingly don't perform well.