Bus rapid transit

Bus rapid transit (BRT), also referred to as a busway or transitway, is a trolleybus, electric bus, or bus service system designed to have higher capacity, reliability, and other quality features than a conventional bus system. Typically, a BRT system includes roadways that are dedicated to buses, and gives priority to buses at intersections where buses may interact with other traffic, alongside design features to reduce delays caused by passengers boarding or disembarking buses, or paying fares. BRT aims to combine the capacity and speed of a light rail transit (LRT) or mass rapid transit (MRT) system with the flexibility, lower cost and simplicity of a bus system.

Although some cities, such as Lima, Liège and Runcorn, pioneered segregated busway systems with some BRT features, the first city to fully integrate every BRT feature into a single system was Curitiba with the Rede Integrada de Transporte in 1974. As of March 2018, a total of 166 cities in six continents have implemented BRT systems, accounting for 4,906 km (3,048 mi) of BRT lanes and about 32.2 million passengers every day. The majority of these are in Latin America, where about 19.6 million passengers ride daily, and which has the most cities with BRT systems, with 54, led by Brazil with 21 cities. The Latin American countries with the most daily ridership are Brazil (10.7 million), Colombia (3.0 million), and Mexico (2.5 million). In the other regions, China (4.3 million) and Iran (2.1 million) stand out. Currently, Transjakarta is the largest BRT network in the world, with about 264.6 kilometres (164.4 mi) of corridors connecting the Indonesian capital city.

Terminology

Bus rapid transit is a mode of mass rapid transit (MRT) and describes a high-capacity urban public-transit system with its own right of way, vehicles at short headways, platform-level boarding, and preticketing.