Background

Bus drivers, transportation planners, transit officials, and members of the riding public, if asked, would be able to suggest better ways to provide bus service than that experienced on most existing routes today. Such recommendations are quite obvious and include better vehicles (easier to get into and out of ), quicker stops (less time consumed by boarding passengers), fewer delays (avoidance of chronic street congestion), faster movement (use of preferential channels), and more responsive service (balance between supply and demand). There is not yet a universally agreed-upon listing of what these improvements might be, but an acronym for them jointly has been coined already: BRT for bus rapid transit. Many specific BRT actions are not capital-intensive and they do not cost large additional funds, but, because most such efforts are beyond the regular procedures, they do require the expenditure of personal and institutional energy to achieve implementation.

BRT under its current definition encompasses all those programs and actions that allow urban bus service to operate faster, but also (it might as well) includes those that offer better reliability, safety, and human amenities, such as good ventilation, comfortable seats, and secure waiting spaces. Many of the program elements have already appeared in the previous chapter, and BRT is not to be seen as a separate transportation mode, but rather as an advanced variant of the basic bus mode, as perhaps something that all bus operations should gradually move toward and eventually become, at least in those situations...