Via Smart Growth Around America, this video of a hard-hitting, hardhat-wearing journalist who goes underground to explore Beijing’s new subway line and later comes out again to examine the city’s new bus rapid transit line, provides a good sense of what’s going on in Beijing with respect to mass transit. If you don’t have time to watch the whole video, here are a few of its more informative facts:
100,000 people use Beijing’s BRT everyday.
Beijing has 2 BRT lines under construction, and 3 lines in the planning process.
By 2020 Beijing plans to have the world’s largest subway system
“It is not common for a president to stand before the nation and say ‘Things haven’t gone well,” Michele Bachelet, Chile’s President, said in March of this year. “But that is exactly what I want to say in the case of Transantiago. The inhabitants of Santiago, especially the poorest deserve an apology.”
So what went so wrong with TranSantiago, the Chilean capital’s new bus system, that warranted a national apology from the president?
Conceived more than six years ago, TranSantiago was nothing less than a complete overhaul of Santiago’s public transit system with a particular focus on the buses that clogged the city’s streets. In broad strokes, Santiago took old, polluting buses off the streets, partially replaced them with new, clean buses, and reorganized bus routes to maximize the efficiency of the system as a whole. The whole purpose was to reduce system costs and, very specially, to reduce air pollution, a major problem due to thermal inversion in the winter months. Read the rest of this entry »
In a talk that appealed to computer geeks, policy wonks and transport engineers alike, Prof. Toni Lindau, EMBARQ’s CTS-Brasil Director, discussed his new “Microscopic Bus Rapid Transit Simulator.”
Prof. Lindau presented his innovative software tool at EMBARQ’s “Transforming Transportation” event, held as part of the TRB’s annual meeting in Washington, DC. Lindau described how the Windows-based program allows transportation planners to simulate various Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) alternatives within Latin American cities. Specifically, the software helps evaluate BRT routes and traffic flows, detect and correct potential problems, and train system designers, managers, and operators. Because the software simulates conditions before any actual construction has begun, it saves valuable time and money at each point along a project timeline.
Wrapping up Sunday afternoon’s discussion, Lee Schipper, EMBARQ’s Research Director, asked fellow transportation gurus the “million dollar” question: Why do governments and funders tackling transportation problems so often pursue high-cost solutions, like highways and rail systems, when there are solutions like Bus Rapid Transit that are tried, true, and cheap? The debate that followed suggested that there is no simple answer, but it likely has less to do with design and engineering and more to do with sociology and culture. Read the rest of this entry »
Wrapping up Sunday afternoon’s discussion, Lee Schipper, EMBARQ’s Research Director, asked fellow transportation gurus the “million dollar” question: Why do governments and funders tackling transportation problems so often pursue high-cost solutions, like highways and rail systems, when there are solutions like Bus Rapid Transit that are tried, true, and cheap? The debate that followed suggested that there is no simple answer, but it likely has less to do with design and engineering and more to do with sociology and culture.
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