A nice South African Music image:
TransMilenio vs congestion
Image by adrimcm
Clear sailing on Transmilenio (woohhooo ! no traffic!)
Giving the bus lanes is a pro-transit carrot & stick approach and is a more efficient use of road space.
Carrot – the bus is much faster than the car. Makes transit much more attractive than a car. TransMilenio has 2 lanes per direction on the principle trunk lines – this allows express routes in the outside lane, ( these may go 4 km+ between stops, and skip many stations) and local routes, which travel on the inside lane and stop at each station.
Stick – there is less space for cars (here they went from 4 to 2 lanes per direction), so congestion goes up, time of travel goes up. This increases the "cost" of driving beyond the financial ding.
The express BRT buses (next level up from plain BRT, and many levels up from plain old express bus) travel remarkably fast and are usually jam packed – officially 160 pax per bus, but in reality more. And some routes have bi-articulated buses (260 pax): farm3.static.flickr.com/2076/2102889616_d0eb375269.jpg
This system is far more efficient use of road space, since of course, a bus full of people takes up far less space than the same number of people would if they are dispersed 1 or 2 per car.
Bogota was lucky in that its arterials were already 4 lanes per direction, or had very wide medians. To create the BRT, they simply expropriated/paved 2 lanes in each direction from the cars (or re-assigned used part of the median to BRT lanes. They did not build separate roads (money saving) The multi-lane method, termed "Quickways" by experts, adds incredible capacity, speed and flexibility to the system, and is a key component in TransMilenio’s immense capacity.
You just need to make sure you have an extensive transit network so everyone has access to the BRT – Bogota doesn’t have this yet – I think they especially need to consider making some more minor streets around the N-S spine into full transit malls to really make the network broadly accessible. An improvement will be when some form of rapid transit is created to Seventh Carrera (street?) some of the N-S volume will be dispersed. I’d guess a third line built about 750 m west of the one on Caracas Avenue would also go a long way in meeting the immense demand (but that is my imagination).
Click the word "TransMilenio" in my tags to see more photos about it.
Colombia has been building BRT left, right, and centre – here are some links:
Cali – MIO www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND54Nohdz1A&NR=1
Pereira – Metrobus: (loud techno music) www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg4ECe_sFwI
Bucaramanga- Metrolinea (flashy marketing): www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6zyzj98VbM
See some good shots of the Rea Vaya, a similar system (with nicer stations) going in in South Africa: www.flickr.com/photos/38229935@N03/3575220517/
and a one-lane-per-direction in Quito: www.transalt.org/files/newsroom/magazine/042Spring/images…
This is how you get people to take transit, make it faster than driving… make it frequent and give it swanky stations: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA4IR7PvO6I (and make everything people need or want in urban life a few steps away from transit)
Another informative video is this one of the Rea Vaya – The Johannesburg system heavily modelled after TransMilenio.
Congratulations to Johannesburg! The Rea Vaya has made it’s debut:
Great News Video about it here: www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3102&ar…
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Have you tried: Sailing in Africa ?