Feeding a BRT with Bicycles: Rio de Janeiro’s T5

Posted: 29 Apr 2008

Related to: São Paulo Bicycle Planning, Developing High-Quality, Low-Cost Mass Transit, Brazil
Contributed by: Jonas Hagen, ITDP

Rio de Janeiro, known as the Marvelous City, is planning the implementation of a marvelous BRT. The proposed 33-kilometer T5 BRT corridor will run from Penha in the Northern end of the city, to Barra da Tijuca, a seaside community in the South that has seen explosive growth in the last 20 years. While Barra da Tijuca’s apartment buildings by the beach resemble the landscape of Miami, the T5 will pass through some of the cities most famous shantytowns or “favelas,” including Cidade de Deus, immortalized in the film “City of God.”


238 parked bicycles at a bus stop near the route of the planned T5 BRT (Photo: Jonas Hagen)

In some neighborhoods along the route, bicycles account for at least 8 percent of daily trips, and this figure is likely around 10 – 15 percent in many areas, according to bicycle expert Zé Lobo of the Rio-based NGO, Transporte Ativo. In these neighborhoods, bicycle access to the BRT will be essential.  That is why Rio’s urban planning institute, the Instituto Pereira Passos, planned a workshop with Transporte Ativo and the Dutch NGO Interface for Cycling Expertise (I-CE), in which ITDP also participated.

“The T5 is meant to show that BRTs can be an important component of Rio de Janeiro’s transport system,” said Antonio Jofre, Planning Coordinator for the Rio Municipality. “The T5 was created by technicians in Rio, and has broad support across municipal authorities,” said Jofre.

19 technicians who are working on the planned BRT corridor participated in the workshop, which included design exercises and site visits to the area of implementation. At one of these sites, they counted a total of 238 parked bicycles. They also observed an important amount of cyclists riding along the route of the planned BRT, raising the possibility of integrating a cycle path into the project design.



Workshop participants discuss conditions as cyclists ride along the T5 route. (Photo: Jonas Hagen)

In the design exercises, participants planned bicycle parking at the transit stations, traffic calmed areas in the neighborhoods around the stations with maximum speeds of 30 kilometers per hour, bike lanes leading to the stations, and bike lanes running parallel to the BRT corridor.  “The traffic around the stations is already slow, so it would not be difficult to make it safe for all levels of cyclists,” said Alan José, an urban planner at the company that plans and runs Rio’s subway. “Also, there is enough road space at the area we studied to have a bicycle path along the corridor, and present demand is high, so we included an off-road path on either side of the BRT,” explained José.

“The workshop was important because integrating the bicycle into the T5 will help expand the culture of the bicycle as an important mode of transport,” said Claudia Tavares, an architect at the Instituto Pereira Passos and the event’s main organizer. “The workshop also showed that this integration is completely possible from a technical standpoint.”