“In cities such as Curitiba, Brazil (the Ground Zero of large-scale BRT) and Bogotá, Colombia, BRT systems can really haul. In Bogotá, where buses have the ability to pass one another in the system, the average speed can top 30 mph. An optimally designed BRT will probably [be] very competitive with what you can achieve with light-rail or tram-based technologies, and it will have lower infrastructure and capital costs, and comparable operating costs,” says Hook.

Read the full article in Vegas Seven here.

Prominent leaders from government, academia and industry discussed powerful strategies and solutions to dramatically improve our transportation systems. Forum participants included Congressman Earl Blumenauer from Oregon; Dr. Robert Bertini, Deputy Administrator, US DOT’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration; Janet Kavinocky from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Judge Quentin Kopp, former Chairman of California High Speed Rail Authority; and other distinguished guests. Read A Smarter Planet’s post about the event here.

To learn more about the Smarter Transportation forum click here.

Andrés Fingeret, Argentina Country Director for the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy, answers some questions and explains the current status of bus rapid transit in Buenos Aires for the environmentally-focused Latin American blog, TuVerde.com. Click here to read the interview.

Construction of the system stations will begin on the first corridor in just a couple of months and the city government aims to open the line for use at the end of 2010. The second and third corridors are in the planning and design stages and will connect the north and south with the city center. ITDP continues to play a key role in the initiative, working with the city to develop this much-needed, efficient and relatively inexpensive mass-transit augmentation.

The city of Guangzhou, China, officially opened the 22.5-kilometer Guangzhou bus rapid transit system, known as GBRT, on February 21, after a ten-day test run over the Chinese New Year holiday period. The GBRT is a system of firsts: it is the first BRT to directly connect to a metro system, the first BRT system in China to include bike parking in its station design, it has the world’s highest number of passenger boardings at BRT stations, highest BRT bus frequency, and longest BRT stations. Station operation is impressive, and its ridership levels are second only to Bogotá’s Transmilenio.

The Guangzhou BRT is the highest-capacity system in Asia. Photo: Walter Hook

Passenger interest in the system is high—all day at Tangxia and other stations people line the pedestrian bridges to view the system in operation. Passenger ridership now exceeds 25,000 passengers per hour in a single direction, at the highest demand point in the rush hour; more than triple any other BRT system in Asia. Daily passenger ridership is currently more than 800,000 boardings per day, which is more than any of Guangzhou’s 5 metro lines, and is expected to exceed 1 million passenger trips per day by the end of 2010. More than 70,000 passenger boardings take place each day at a single station (Gangding). Each ride on the system is 2 yuan, or passengers can use a smart card to board. Regular smart card users get a 40% discount after taking 15 trips in a month, and passengers can transfer for free to other BRT routes in the same direction.

Stations are integrated with other features of the urban environment, such as metro stations and nearby buildings. This temporary bridge at Gangding BRT station will be dismantled in April, when a direct metro-connecting tunnel will open. Photo: Walter Hook

The 26-station system runs along the Zhongshan Avenue corridor, an important route for commuters, in the center of the roadway with right-side prepaid passenger boarding. Each 12-meter long bus in the system features two right-side doors and uses liquid petroleum gas (LPG) fuel.

System stations are spaced approximately 880 meters apart all along the corridor, with one further station to be added in 2011, upon completion of a related road project. The GBRT features connecting tunnels from the BRT platform to the Guangzhou metro at three stations, one of which is currently open, with the other two to open later this year. Forty-two bus routes operate in the corridor, all but one of which operates both inside and outside the BRT corridor and stations.

The system is regulated by the Public Transport Management Office (planning) and BRT Management Co. (control), and is operated by seven bus operating companies divided into three corporate groups. Bus operators are paid per kilometer rather than per passenger, with a new BRT control center used to control bus departures from terminals. The Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP) was the international design and planning lead on the project, and the local lead agency was the Guangzhou Municipal Engineering Design and Research Institute (GMEDRI). Infrastructure costs to build the GBRT were 30 million yuan renminbi (US$ 4.4 million) per kilometer.

Guangzhou’s system was faster to implement than a new metro line would have been, with the conceptual plan, engineering design, construction each taking one year to complete. Including times when the project was placed on hold, planning and building the Guangzhou BRT took five years from start to finish.

For more information on the Guangzhou BRT, click here. For photos, click here.

Every pedestrian killed by motor vehicles on city streets is a result of policy decisions that favor vehicle speed over pedestrian safety. This was the message that Michael King brought to Rio de Janeiro, who led field visits and during the week of 22 February 2010, conducted a workshop together with the municipal government, in an effort to increase comfort and safety for pedestrians.

Michael King speaking to Municipal planners during field visit to Lapa

“If you are satisfied with the number of pedestrian deaths in your city, then you have nothing to worry about. If you seek to make safer streets, with less deaths, then you need to reduce vehicle speeds,” Michael told a room full of municipal decision makers, traffic engineers and urban planners. Previously, he and municipal staff had visited the area around Brazil Central Station, the train station that was immortalized in eponymous 1998 film directed by Walter Salles, and Lapa, an area with rich historical architecture, where nightclub-going crowds clog the streets during the night.

Groups present their proposals

After laying out the basic principles of safe streets, Michael helped municipal staff redesign the streets around Central Station and in Lapa. These designs will be finalized in the coming weeks and implemented in phases beginning with inexpensive pilot projects.

See the following post on the workshop from Simone Costa’s blog (in Portuguese): http://urbetransp.blogspot.com/2010/02/espaco-publico-e-seguranca-viaria-para.html

After a year of planning, Mexico City launched its first public bike system, called Ecobici, on February 16. The system, which features 1,114 bikes and 85 stations, is part of the new Bicycle Mobility Strategy of Mexico City, which seeks to raise the number of cyclists in the city by from one percent to five percent 2012.

Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard at the inauguration of Ecobici Photo: Bernardo Baranda

In his speech at the launch of the new system, Mexico Mayor Marcelo Ebrard highlighted the how the system can benefit the city inhabitants, presenting it as the cheapest public and individual means of transport. Considering that Ecobici’s annual subscription fee is just US $23, and the bike can be used daily for 30 minutes free of charge at any time, the annual cost of Ecobici is less than US $0.01 per trip. Any other means of public transport is at least three times as expensive per year. And one liter of gas is up to 7 times as expensive without including the cost of parking the vehicle.

Secretary of Environment Martha Delgado publicly acknowledged the work and support of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and other social organizations on this initiative at a press conference. Secretary Delgado announced that the launch of this program goes along with the publication of reforms to the Traffic Regulation, which gives more rights to cyclists and pedestrians. There has also been changed the right of road use, in order to give priority to cyclists and pedestrians over all the vehicles. Along with this, more severe punishments and fines will be applied to the vehicles which violate the traffic regulations. The Ecobici initiative will be followed by others dedicated to the reclamation of public space for pedestrian use and the integration of Ecobici with the public transport infrastructure.

The culmination of over five years of efforts to document and improve the state of the art in cost-effective public transport solutions for cities, the BRT Guide is also available here in English and here in Chinese. The current edition, expanded to over 800 pages, includes contributions from a wide range of professionals and practitioners with direct experience in designing and implementing BRT systems all over the world.

New Report Finds Greener, Cheaper Alternatives to “Free” Parking
Report Examines High Costs of Parking, Offers Sustainable, Better Practice, Alternatives for U.S. Policy Makers

New York, NY, February 23, 2010—Ninety-nine percent of all U.S. driving trips end in a free parking space, but when the economic and environmental consequences are considered, these parking spots aren’t really “free” after all. Smarter parking management can benefit consumers and businesses in time and money saved, according to a report released today by Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). Click here to download the report.

“U.S. Parking Policies: An Overview of Management Strategies,” cowritten by Professor Rachel Weinberger of the University of Pennsylvania, John Kaehny, and Matthew Rufo, illustrates how parking management in most U.S. cities creates additional traffic and air pollution, and feeds auto-dependence. As long as parking is considered independently of transportation policy, parking demand and traffic will continue to increase in the form of excess auto trips, on-street parking shortages, and a decline in the overall pedestrian environment. Traditional parking policy prioritizes private automobile use, undermining the use of public transit, walking and bicycling as travel modes, spurring significantly higher household travel costs for Americans.

“The poorly conceived parking policies found in the majority of U.S. cities are a major impediment to creating an effective and balanced urban transportation system,” says the report’s author Professor Rachel Weinberger. “There is a growing movement in many U.S. cities to manage parking demand with policies that encourage balanced transportation systems.”

In the last five to ten years, U.S. transportation planners have become much more aware of the impact of parking on congestion, air quality, economic development and the pedestrian environment. The report examines good parking management strategies that have been implemented in the cities of Boulder, Cambridge, Chicago, New York, Portland, and San Francisco, and makes policy recommendations to U.S. decision makers.

“Weinberger, Kaehny, and Rufo show how cities can begin to repair the damage caused by decades of bad planning for parking,” says University of California, Los Angeles, Professor Donald Shoup, author of “The High Cost of Free Parking.” “The authors recommend reforms that can create many benefits ranging from making it easier to find a parking space all the way up to slowing climate change. The case studies of six cities that have reformed their parking policies provide clear blueprints that any city can adapt to fit the local circumstances.”

“Smarter parking policies could help American workers and consumers save time and money,” says Michael Replogle, Global Policy Director and Founder of ITDP, who coauthored the report’s foreword. “Many aspects of current U.S. parking policies just don’t work. We need to use these new parking principles to reduce the costly hidden subsidies that force Americans to spend a much higher share of their income on transportation than citizens of other countries while spurring climate change, air pollution, and energy insecurity.”

Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and other U.S. cities are experimenting with new parking policies and other cities can learn from them. Through more sensible parking management, the authors assert, we can improve our cities, the environment, the economy, and overall quality of life. To receive a copy of the report, click here or contact Claudia Gunter at cgunter@itdp.org or (646) 839-6479.

###

Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, and ITDP Board President, participated in the launch of Rio de Janeiro’s Climate Change Action Plan on July 27, 2009. That plan envisions an 8 % reduction in greenhouse gases by 2012, a 16 % reduction by 2014, and a 20 % reduction by 2020. Mr. Peñalosa told decisionmakers and journalists at the event that Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and bicycles could improve mobility in Rio and greatly reduce emissions from the transport sector. Access the full article (in Portuguese, published by Agencia Brasil) here.

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) was a big winner on 13 January 2010, when Brazil’s federal government announced the large urban transportation projects that it will finance for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Marcio Fortes, Minister of the Ministry of Cities, said the federal government was funding projects that could be implemented in time for the Cup. As such, the metros in Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Porto Alegre and Salvador will not receive funding, and BRT projects are present in 9 of the 12 cities. The total value of the investment by the federal government is about $ 6.5 billion.

Belo Horizonte will construct 6 BRT corridors, Cuiabá will construct 2 BRT corridors, Curitiba will add another corridor to its already extensive system,
Fortaleza will construct 5 corridors, Manaus will construct one corridor, Porto Alegre will build two new BRT lines, Recife will build two BRTs, Rio de Janeiro will build one BRT for the World Cup (an additional two BRTs are planned for the 2016 Olympic Games), and Salvador will construct one BRT corridor.

Access the full article (in Portuguese) here.