Guangzhou, China: Winning The Future With BRT

hmmm... all those little red bikes. Could this be why Dan Mays believes bike share is a communist plot?

I have BRT envy! China seems to be doing a lot right, between this and the high speed rail they're building. And here in NYC politicians, the media and their corporate owners are attacking "controversial" bike lanes, BRT, pedestrian plazas, traffic calming, bike sharing and gutting our once world class public transit system.

Welcome to the 21st century, when the US is racing to see how fast it can plummet to banana republic status.

Mmmyes, because all that smog is caused by buses, and not the tens of thousands of cars they're replacing. And people would much rather sit for an hour in traffic in their personal car than on a bus for 10 minutes to get to the same place.

i only noticed the speed-up at that one spot. i just wasn't sure if it was intentional or not.

BRT is a fraud from top to bottom -- something i've argued for years now, and within two weeks of first hearing about the concept -- to me it's always been a way to prevent public transit, and destroy what's left of it, and ultimately increase dependence on private motorized transport -- namely, cars. car ownership and driving continue to skyrocket anywhere BRT is implemented, sometimes even in the face of state-level bans against driving -- that's how desperate people are to avoid the bus.

there's a reason Republicans and BP/Shell and Volvo and others support BRT with (tens of?) millions of dollars of funding. there's a reason the most polluted places on earth are knee-deep in BRT. there are very few self-described progressives willing to critique BRT and many other obviously-terrible urban planning sacred tenets -- i do hope that eventually changes.

there are lots of critiques of BRT out there -- many equivocating, unfortunately, but any serious analysis will show the actual results of BRT instead of hype and half-truths from various developing nations, the various BRT 'think tanks', etc.

some simple critiques:
1) BRT provides protected space to motorized transport over non-motorized transport -- namely, bicycles,
2) city buses are extremely uncomfortable, and can not ever provide a dignified ride (which is why the vast majority of people who ride them simply have no other choice but to do so -- often due to lack of personal income/wealth),
3) buses are an incredible deterrent to bicycle travel, and as such, should not be tolerated,
4) BRT corridors have proven to be extremely dangerous to pedestrians,
5) buses are responsible for incredible amounts of toxic air pollution -- poisoning the citizens of Brazilian cities like Curitiba for decades now,
6) buses and BRT infrastructure requires immense amounts of operational expenditures, especially in non-developed countries were wages are relatively high
7) crush loads witnessed in developing nations are not tolerated in developed countries,
BRT infrastructure, including the roads/stations/raised medians are extremely ugly,
9) BRT corridors are extremely noisy,
10) BRT corridors often work to create the 'highway within a highway' effect that destroys the livability of a corridor and city,
11) the list goes on and on and on.

that's just off the top of my head. there are literally dozens of good (and obvious) reasons why anyone who cares about sustainability and good public transport should oppose BRT at every turn.

but, as Streetfilms now knows, there is a _lot_ of money and prestige available for those who sign onto the agenda of Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Bus, etc.

Wow, I don't understand the BRT hate at all. AS far as I can tell, BRT involves taking road space AWAY from single or low occupancy cars and giving it to buses, so that they can move quickly and therefore become, in fact, highly attractive to people who want to avoid the hassle of driving/parking in dense urban areas. I suppose buses moving at 25 mph are more dangerous to pedestrians than cars crawling along at 10, but I fail to see how they are inherently more dangerous to cyclists.

Is your position is that all motorized traffic should be eliminated and we should all ride bicycles instead? Um, okaaay...

The funny thing is you could replace the word "BRT"/"buses" with the word "LRV" on every one of those points and it would be equally or more applicable. Particularly with regard to bikes (many LRV systems have no bike accommodations whatsoever, while every built BRT system either has bike hooks/racks on vehicles or parking at every station), and with regard to noise/pedestrian safety (heavier vehicles with longer stopping distances). 

Curitiba is polluted and unlivable? What? Peter, it would be helpful if you actually had a clue what you're talking about. I'd be inclined to agree that developed-country BRT has too high operating costs, but there's a chasm between that and what you're saying.

For the record, Jaime Lerner built BRT at the same time he built downtown pedestrian plazas, using tactics so severe that they'd make JSK look like a model of consultative democracy. For example, when motorists threatened to violate a road closure, he got families that supported him to sit on those roads and draw.

The real success story in Guangzhou has been the transformative impact of its new(some might say "traditional") underground metro system.

Not only is it a fantastic system, but cheap, and planned and built in well under 10 years.

moving people 'quickly' and 'efficiently' should be two of many considerations, but they should not be primary considerations. we should allow people to get around under their own power, while being able to hold onto their dignity. after that we can talk about how to provide people with dignified transport. after that we can get to things like personal affordability, comfort, convenience, and then maybe even eventually consider factors like speed and efficiency. most planners, unfortunately, consider these factors in the reverse order, and 'dignity' makes it into the discussion.

if you tend to focus on speed and efficiency, they will usually come at the expense of human considerations like comfort/quality/dignity. so this is an argument that recognizes the inherent dignity of every human being -- so this will not be comprehensible to most transportation and livability advocates today -- but it remains essential and, of course, should be the first and minimum consideration for any transport system.

animal rights activists argue that the transport of animals should be like the transport of humans, but i'm not sure these animal rights activists have ever witnessed BRT-based transportation.

but, even without taking taking the view that humans are sentient, living beings, it turns out that the practical implications of not providing folks with dignified transport become readily apparent in various policies and systems, like BRT -- people will avoid BRT like the plague -- BRT has consequences.

this shouldn't even be up for debate in a civilized society, but that's where we're at.

if we look at examples of fast and efficient transport throughout history, we find that focusing on 'fast' and 'efficiency' often comes at the expense of human dignity:
1. transport of Africans to other parts of the world in the holds of slave ships -- might or might not have been 'fast' at the time, but was certainly efficient.
2. trains that carried Jews and gypsies and others to the death camps in Nazi Germany.
3. the next less uncivilized form of inhuman transport is the packed trains of India -- not comparable in terms of misery and deaths-caused-in-route to the previous two examples -- but still extremely high (the highest?) by modern standards.
4. the next less uncivilized form of inhuman transport is many BRT systems in the developing world -- again, India has a particularly good track record in terms of man's inhumanity to man, but they're not alone.

buses don't cause all toxic air pollution -- just much of it -- ask Curitiba, Bogota, Mexico City, Guangzhou, etc. or we can battle straw men all day.

as for people who would rather sit in their car for an hour vs. sit on a bus for 10 minutes -- well, what can i say about that other than what i've already said -- people hate buses -- we have what Schopenhauer described as 'the will to life,' but once achieved, we also seem to strive for freedom and dignity. maybe blaming humans for these seemingly-innate intuitions is the appropriate policy response?

people and cyclists fear riding a bike near a bus -- "subjective safety" -- David Hembrow's Netherlands-based blog has made this argument, too. it's a policy decision on our part -- do we want to allow people to ride or not?

i might not eliminate all motorized transport overnight, but I would certainly prioritize all human-powered transport (namely, walking and biking) over all motorized transport.

i also don't believe people should be forced to travel below ground, like insects.

once your build a BRT system, it is almost impossible to replace with dignified transport. in the history of the world, it has rarely happened, and BRT has been around for 30+ years. i am hopeful, though, that a bus-to-bike corridor conversion will happen in the future.

as far as developing bike share at the same time as bus rapid transit, it's not just a question of dignity -- it's also priorities. i think we should allow people to get around under their own power, first. after we've achieved that to a very high degree, then we can worry about providing motorized transport for folks. what is the budget spending on BRT vs. spending on bikes? 10,000-to-1? if we're interested in destroying the world, then maybe funding motorized transport at a clip of 10,000-to-1 is the right idea, but i personally would choose to use the money differently.

yes, Curitiba is polluted and unlivable. just like many other BRT cities. it wasn't me who described Bogota as a "pre-apocalyptic technological dystopia". if you fill your streets with thousands of arsenic-spewing diesel engines -- yeah -- you're gonna have a problem with pollution and livability. as for how someone could deem a place filled with shantytowns and favelas/ghettos 'livable' -- well, i don't have an explanation for that. maybe paved roads are an unnecessary uber-luxury?

as for Jaime Lerner using his dictator-like powers to force BRT on the city of Curitiba (which he is very open about) -- yeah -- the population resisted his big, polluting, anti-livability bus scheme, but they lost -- Lerner won. this explains a reason why many cities in developing nations are able to have BRT forced upon them, and societies with stronger civil and human rights laws, and stronger democratic institutions, are able to beat the Lerners of the world, and prevent BRT from invading their towns.

of course, it'd be nice if regular people could count on 'advocates' to provide a little more support for them when they're opposing BRT in their towns, but instead, the technocratic 'highway engineer/transit advocate-knows-best' patronization scheme remains ascendant.

if 'bizarro world' is a place where people don't make nonsensical statements parroting the lines of the oil and gas industry, then yes, i live there.

as for how BRT could be undesirable yet still crowded, this is not complex logic -- the two conditions are largely, if not completely, orthogonal -- the trains to Auschwitz were very crowded, too, but the passengers didn't have a choice -- just like the passengers of BRT systems, and every mass transit system that degrades humans, don't have a choice. while tens of millions of Americans sit in car traffic every day, one could draw the simple-minded and erroneous conclusion that these people loved to drive and loved to sit in traffic, or one could use their common sense and conclude that these people have no other choice.

Curitiba has never made a 'most livable cities' list that i've ever seen. perhaps you'd like to point us to some evidence that Curitiba is livable, much less one of the 'most liveable cities in the world'?

within South America, i've only ever seen a few cities crack the Top 100 Most Livable Cities -- Montevideo at 76, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Panama City, Monterrey are all Top 100. A few other South American cities start cracking the Top 200. Curitiba? I'd be astonished if it made the Top 500. Even the worst, most corrupt, crime-ridden, desperate US cities are probably better off than Curitiba -- Detroit, Newark, etc. Brasilia, the highest-ranked Brazilian city, comes in at 104. A few Brazilian cities come in soon thereafter (Sao Paulo, Rio, etc.). Curitiba? Nope. Bogota? Nope. BRT destroys cities.

The air pollution in Curitiba is not just a leading cause of asthma there (especially among children) -- it also contributes to increased cancer rates -- who knew that sulphur and arsenic could be bad for you?

Peter, here's why it's helpful to get a clue before you start commenting: Curitiba has low pollution levels, because car use there is very low. Car ownership there is high by Brazilian standards - it's one of the country's richest cities - but car use is low. The local complaints are that Lerner made the industry flee to the suburbs, creating pollution there.

I'm not sure why you bring up Mexico City into this discussions. Yes, it has BRT. It also has a subway the size of New York's. But mainly, its geography promotes thermal inversions, trapping polluted air. In terms of policy, it's actually very progressive - look up "hoy no circula."

And high crowding levels are a common feature of rapidly developing cities. You'd still much rather live in a city with Tokyo, Shanghai, or Bogota's overcrowding than with Bangkok's air quality.

Compare BRT to slave ships and Nazi trains is just ridiculous. In both the ship and the train situation, people were transported involuntarily and were basically treated like cargo. No one is "forced" to travel by bus, bike, car, or rail, even in undemocratic counties like China.

Peter, it seems that to you the only "dignified" form of transportation is bicycle, and that part if that "dignity" comes from the fact that bicycles don't cause any pollution. However, for someone who has a long commute in China, they would care less about pollution if they can afford to get there faster with less sweat. BRT (along with rail) is a more environmentally friendly alternative than motorized scooters with two stroke engines.

Another important note is that buses in China (even regular bus) don't have as many stops as we have in the US, and that riders don't need to make a request to stop (buses stop at every stop). Each stop is well identified and sheltered. So riding the bus in China is actually more comparable with rail, with the benefit of more routes providing direct service but with the trade off of traffic congestion.

Air pollution is a diesel vs electric issue; it has nothing to do with rail vs. bus, as either can be electric or diesel.

The main reason to convert from bus to rail is when you have reached ridership levels where you need to carry more than 200 passengers per vehicle, which exceeds the capacity of double-articulated buses and necessitates long multi-car trains. This is also the point where the decreased cost of having one operator carry many passengers begins to outweigh the higher capital cost of the railway and rail vehicles. If you have already built a fully separated ROW for BRT, then you can quite easily convert it to rail when you reach this point.

Peter, I'm not sure which study you're talking about, or why you're transforming "air pollution lower than the standards still kills" into "Curitiba has higher pollution levels than cities of comparable wealth." Curitiba for the record is less polluted than Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Yes, moving industry out was part of the same pollution-reduction program as pedestrianizing streets and shifting road space from cars to buses. So what?

It's beyond stupid to compare accident rates per vehicle. The reason public transit is a win is that those collision-prone 4 mpg vehicles (both buses and trains) carry scores or hundreds of passengers each. Per passenger, there's at least 1-2 orders of magnitude separating cars' collision death rate from that of any other mode of transportation, except motorcycles.

"The BRT folks will never allow overhead wires for buses"

I think the several existing electrified BRT systems, such as Quito BRT, the silver line in Boston, the GLT in Nancy and Caen, as well as the future Van Ness BRT in San Francisco, disprove this statement.

I think the several existing electrified BRT systems, such as Quito BRT, the silver line in Boston, the GLT in Nancy and Caen, as well as the future Van Ness BRT in San Francisco, disprove this statement.

I stand semi-corrected -- my statement was inexact -- let me be precise:

The BRT folks will [do everything in their power to prevent] overhead wires for buses -- one, because it decreases dependence on fossil fuels, but two, because it actually costs money -- and construction/capital costs (as opposed to operating costs) are the only advantage BRT has over rail. But even the Oil & Gas Industry is not all-powerful -- as the citizens of Berkeley were able to demonstrate -- so just like in other aspects of life, there will be exceptions to every rule.

The Quito BRT is not 'electrified' -- it runs mostly on polluting diesel (fossil fuel). Only part of one of three trunk lines is electrified.

And, I'm guessing that the reason this one Quito line is electrified is the same reason that parts of the GLT lines in Nancy and Caen are electrified -- the electricity-delivering systems (the overhead wires, etc.) were already in place from an existing trolleybus/tram system (so, not much additional capital/construction costs to use them).

I don't see BRT ever making it into SF -- I'm going to do my best to fight it, with many others -- but if it did manage to invade our fair city, it would, in fact, be slightly less horrific if it were electrified (as many of SF's buses already are). Noise reduction potential of electrified/trolleybus systems cannot be underestimated. You can live _right next to_ a bus line on an uphill, and if it's electrified, you might not even be able to hear the bus climbing -- just the whir of the electric motors -- they're not completely silent, but they're orders of magnitude better than regular buses.

And the Quito trolley/electrified line is -- surprise -- at capacity, so Quito is looking to replace it with a tram -- an astoundingly-expensive and disruptive operation that will probably never happen (as it well-known by the Oil & Gas Lobby).

SF Streetsblog did a post on Quito and biking and buses -- check out the pics of the horrendous-looking bus-y streetscape, and note how cyclists are forced to 'steal' space away from those buses on occasion -- for the brave, only. This is a simple matter of priorities -- do you want to allow people to bike, or do you want to force them onto a bus -- the choice is largely up to us.

I rode the partially-electrified Silver Line ("Silver Lie") in Boston -- I forgot about that -- disaster. Honestly, it was comical -- watching the driver stop the bus and get out of our bumpy ride and physically remove the trolley poles of the bus from the overhead wires. The bus was so tight and cramped and crowded, too -- glad I didn't have big luggage bags like a lot of the other passengers.

As for those wacky GLT bus/trams, well, they've got serious problems -- I thought they were all discontinued by now, but I might be confusing that with some other wacky hybrid train/bus technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_Guided_Light_Transit#Disadvantages

Having to repave the streets, just like the LA Orange Line, bumpy/uncomfortable rides, breakdowns, etc. Just a total disaster through and through.

Like my old engineering prof used to say:

"People are going to screw up, and do all sorts of horrible things (which will result in people suffering and dying) -- just don't let it be you."

It was good advice, I think.

So basically Guangzhou has separate fares for separate vehicles, is that right? They have integrated ticketing but not integrated fares?

Regarding network structure- The convenience of 'no transfer' is highly debatable. On a system with low volumes/frequency it might be justified to run under the direct service model. However eliminating transfers makes the system very complicated, precludes the gain of efficiencies from using a larger vehicle with less labour, and usually has lower frequency on the suburban branches and makes people wait for their particular bus rather than catch the first service going past.

In Brisbane, you can sit at the main busway stop with a bus going past roughly every minute or so. But you can wait there for up to half an hour to one hour for "your" bus because all the other buses go down the busway and then branch elsewhere and your destination is off-busway. In a feeder-transfer model you'd just catch the first service that goes by and transfer out at the appropriate station to a more frequent feeder.

80% of the people who use our busway system do not ever set foot into a busway station- they come from boring bus stops in the suburbs where buses fan off the busway into into the suburbs as low-frequency routes. A direct service model is going to leave those people waiting at bus stops in the suburbs for lower frequency services.

Human Transit: Why Transferring is good for you and good for your city
http://www.humantransit.org/2009/04/why-transferring-is-good-for-you-and-good-for-your-city.html

In a system designed around transfer, you can have adequate frequency (5-3 min) on the main trunk line served by large vehicles (i.e. Bogota-bus or Toronto-rail) and then because the bus route is now shorter, turn those buses back to where they came from in the suburbs, increasing the frequency dramatically on the suburban sections and substantially reducing waiting time at bus stops in the suburbs.

Interchange is only an major issue in systems where the connecting service facilities are poor, the fares and ticketing are not integrated well, and the connecting service's frequency is unreliable or infrequent.

BRT can work, and I am not philosophically opposed to it. BRT has worked at improving transport in Ottawa and Brisbane and other places. BRT along with LRT and RRT are just tools to do a job. BRT can be useful in its own right or feeding to other modes. But in cases where you have to move greater than 20 000 pphd it might be better and more efficiently done as a rail metro except where the cost of labour and capital favour BRT operation.

I am very impressed with the cycling used to feed the BRT stations and the card you can use on the bus and the bicycle. That's a fantastic innovation that many cities could learn from- get different modes working together as a whole. You can't put rail or bus up every street, but you can put a bike on most streets.

er. so what are Peter Smith's transport chops, again?

Where traffic congestion is a real time problem in cities, the cheapest initial option is to consider a BRT system. Carefully designed as a function of demand, it meets the expectation of the general population of all physical conditons. It increases mobility in the city,and stimulates economic activities. Congratulations Guangzhou.

Curious to know what is your ideal existing city of say 5 to 15 million people from a transport point of view?