Regional and Urban Design Committee

  • 1.  What is BRT and what isn't

    Posted 07-30-2015 08:10 PM
    This message has been cross posted to the following Discussion Forums: Committee on the Environment and Regional and Urban Design Committee .
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    What BRT is and what it isn't 

    It isn't too often that mayors of North American cities travel to South America to admire urban planning models. There is one notable exception, and that is Curitiba, Brazil, where forty years ago a new vision for urban mobility was created, revamping the private bus chaos that dominates many South American big cities. 

    I like the Curitiba example especially, for it was invented by an architect who, once he was elected mayor, immediately began to think outside the box. He watched the clogged major arteries leading in and out of his rapidly growing mega city, the foul air and the many carless urban poor that couldn't get anywhere, and decided that something needed to be done that was fast, relatively cheap and system-wide. Unlike the one shiny subway line that Chile's Santiago boasts, he gave his Curitiba a whole system of fast buses that operate like trains all across town. More or less overnight. Nobody had seen such drastic repossession of streets before. Even the buses where unheard of with their double articulation (two accordion elements) and some extra doors. Jamie Lerner and his creative transit planners left nothing untouched that could make the good old bus more efficient: Of course the buses had their own lanes and signals (many other cities had that already in place, at least sporadically). But nobody had before tried bus boarding from elevated platforms, or selling bus tickets in advance of boarding, restricting entrance to the waiting areas to those with tickets like a subway station, elegantly eliminating bus stop loitering. (At the time low floor buses didn't exist yet and lots of time was wasted with people stepping up and down the three steep steps or deploying ramps for handicap access).
    Curitiba BRT bus station with boarding tubes and custom double articulated buses


    Thus in Curitiba, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) was born, and North American transit planners took notice, mostly, though, for the wrong reasons, namely the lower cost compared to rail.
    BRT is Bus Rapid Transit - a high quality, high capacity rapid transit system that, in many ways, improves upon traditional rail transit systems. Vehicles travel in exclusive lanes, avoiding traffic. Passengers walk to comfortable stations, pay their fares in the station, and board through multiple doors like a train. Service is frequent and fast. Vehicles can be powered by hybrid electric or clean diesel (source)
    Much too much in love with the automobile, North American planners usually strip off some major features before they consider implementation here. For example, the consideration of full network implementation. What we call BRT here amounts to false advertising. Sometimes, cities do little else than add the word "rapid" to existing service, like with Rapid Bus, which isn't the same as BRT.
    .....Read all

    Klaus Philipsen FAIA
    Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
    Baltimore MD
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  • 2.  RE: What is BRT and what isn't

    Posted 08-07-2015 08:44 PM
      |   view attached
    BRT -

    Transit system definition and design should include considerations of current high-capacity bus inefficiencies. As defined, BRT's are to be fashioned in 'big rig' form, having to do primarily with capacity. Just this one criteria alone, is offsetting design enough to destabilize what could be a good solution to our ongoing attempts to resolve transportation needs. Do the math. If you can move twice the number of people 8 times as fast with 4 times the number of vehicles, each being 1/6 the size of a bus.... and with 50% of vehicles owned and maintained by the public and......  If this equation, looks unrecognizably healthy, it makes a point. That of current design processes - limited in scope, validation and result.

    As suggested above, is it not unreasonable to assume the preferences of the user when addressing BRT design? The automobile, with some 200 years of use, certainly has an experiential statement to be made for what works and doesn't. Contrarily it seems urban planners and transportation designers are somehow tethered to BRT as prescribed. It is apparently common for those challenged with mass transportation development to rally toward off the shelf solutions and base design criteria on everything opposite-pole of the automobile. When at 9pm in Denver, I see empty buses tooling around with no passengers, I can't help to think.....

    Without due respect and consideration of what the transportation industry has peddled fairly successfully for centuries and what the public has used, fairly successfully, and for a similar amount of time, any effort to address design for innovative and new mass transit transportation systems is susceptible to failure. It is tiring to watch tech-driven attempts at lawn-dart solutions to a misunderstood need. Interestingly, it seems the automobile industry itself is plagued with this same design process, as year after year tech-driven in-dash gadgetry bolsters continuous upgrades to a 200 year old road-based transportation design, albeit one that continues to intrigue and sell, year after year.

    Is there an answer in the merging of systems design criteria? Tried and true, always speaks louder at the design round table. Why are we not hearing?

    As one observes the BRT concept as currently defined and from outside the box, it certainly satisfies a similarly 'boxed' set of design criteria. Though, there is SO much more that this BRT concept can do. Taking a step back from the box and the concept itself, one might consider and even point the finger at the actual process of design as being culprit and holding hostage the ultimate and responsible solution. It is not a mystery- that of design. Though it seems as though we have lost sight of the process - another inherent flaw in the search for solutions. Everyone understands that any design result will be as flawed or successful as the design process itself. So, step away from the prescriptive solution, the process and the problem. Start from the beginning with each need described, then unveiled of opportunity and constraint. Finally, blend this into design criteria that actually contributes to a validated design route. Whether this criteria is achievable is based on application of the actual design tool - technology, perhaps new.

    We need to think as if standing beside Carl Benz.

    Airail (excerpt attached) was one of many entries in the BRT Design Competition. This particular design was almost denied entry, due to the buses limited capacity assumed by the Contest title.... BRT.  Nevertheless, it was allowed, reviewed and when displayed at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. even GM was interested!  This exemplifies a certain need to join hands in adding fuel to the pre-design phase and en-route to changing our way of thinking about transportation. I would like to think that Airail was, and is still, one of many benchmark attempts.
       
    Keep the design chin up. Breathe in the process with fresh air and innovation. Solutions happen in the continued contribution and when based on real need.

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    Kenneth E. Martin, AIA
    Principal Proprietor
    KeMA
    Thornton CO
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