China Got On The Bus
Posted July 20, 2010 at 12:39 pm 
Filed in: Central city decline, urban collapse, traffic congestion, air pollution and high oil demand are all problems linked to excessive dependence on automobiles. Many cities rely on transit to diminish such burdens, given the virtues of transit in providing low cost massive mobility and congestion management—with its associated benefits of improving air quality and conserving energy.
A fairly common option in places other than the United States is the use of buses, a service that can be implemented cost-effectively on routes where ridership may not be sufficient or where the capital investment to implement rail systems may be prohibitive. Experts including Om Prakash Agarwal, a senior urban transport specialist at the World Bank, encourage systems such as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) as a low cost solution to improve urban mobility.
The essence of BRT is that bus operating speed and reliability can be improved by reducing or eliminating various types of delay. This permanent, integrated system uses buses on roadways or dedicated lanes, incorporating low-cost technologies such as traffic management improvements (bus turnouts, bus boarding islands, and curb realignments) and bus signal preference. These systems use bus stations instead of bus stops, allowing passengers to pay before boarding the bus and thus enabling faster, more orderly boarding. BRT can also use longer buses, which means fewer total vehicles are needed. According to Dario Hidalgo, senior transport engineer for EMBARQ, a group researching international transport at the World Resources Institute, one of the major benefits of using BRT is “decreasing the need for people to move to cars and motorcycles.”
Source: FTA
Recent data from the International Energy Agency points out that China might have passed the United States to become the world’s biggest energy consumer. And as its economy continues growing, so will its energy consumption and need for greater mobility. However, it seems to be the case that it might not adopt a high-energy life-style and buy many cars, given its fast development of rail networks and the fact that in the past two years China has become the world’s fastest-growing market for high-speed city buses. About a dozen Chinese cities have working BRT systems today, and dozens more are establishing them.
Source: E&E, courtesy of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy
Last week, E&E daily reported the story of Guangzhou, China’s industrial dynamo and home to more than three million people, where since February it has operated a 14-mile stretch of a main road with bus-only lanes in the middle. Estimates indicate that the system has set several world records for BRT, handling 800,000 trips a day (a greater ridership than every metro line in mainland China except Beijing’s) and reducing emissions by about 20,000 tons of CO2 a year—approximately the emissions from 4,000 cars in the United States.
This plan was set up by a U.S.-headquartered nongovernmental organization, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), which explained that the BRT not only diminishes traffic in Zhongshan Avenue (Guangzhou’s arterial road), but also in other parts of town. Cars can now travel faster without buses crowding the lanes; and bicyclists and pedestrians can also commute in a more comfortable way.
Source: E&E, courtesy of the ITDP
BRT has also been widely used in some Latin American megacities, such as Bogotá, São Paulo, and Mexico City. Particularly in the developing world, cities have turned to BRT to address heavy traffic congestion. The example of Curitiba, Brazil, inspired the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to recommend U.S. cities to analyze, and evaluate the benefits of implementing BRT. Features like prepaid boarding are being used in New York, and enclosed stations and fully protected bus lanes have been built in Los Angeles and Cleveland. New York, Boston, San Francisco and Orlando are currently implementing BRT lines. However, BRT initiatives have been comparatively slow to take off in American cities.
IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said in an interview that the United States is by far the biggest per-capita energy consumer, with the average American consuming annually five times more energy than the average Chinese citizen. Obviously, motor vehicles (particularly cars) are among the chief culprits of this. Examples like Guangzhou city’s BRT initiative indicate that, in comparison to the United States, the Chinese are “riding the bus” towards lower-energy transportation paths.
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