BRT is an abbreviation for
bus rapid transit, a recent mode of public transportation that is meant to elevate
bus service to
subway standards. BRT removes various
disadvantages of bus service that make it inferior to
subway service.
1.
Frequency: Subways run every five to ten minutes while buses run every 20 minutes at their best and up to every hour at their worst. BRT dedicates a large
fleet of buses to its route and schedules them to come at subway-comparable frequency.
2.
Reliable arrival times: Subways have a single track all to themselves so unlike buses they don't get
stuck in traffic. This means that every trip takes about the same time to complete and therefore the intervals between the arrival of one train and another are uniform. A
subway rider can therefore truly expect
service at regular intervals.
As for buses, because their travel times vary significantly with traffic, they can't achieve the same
uniform time intervals. Therefore,
one cannot depend on a bus to arrive every X minutes. BRT remedies this disadvantage of bus service by dedicating an
exclusive lane for bus service so that traffic conditions do not create very
irregular intervals between the arrival of any two given buses.
3.
Speed of Service: Unlike
subways,
buses travel any given distance much slower. This is due to several reasons.
The most obvious one is that a subway train is able to travel without stopping because there's no
heavy traffic. (There is some traffic so light it is almost negligent; the presence of another train ahead of the first one on the same track) Most buses, however, put up with a lot of traffic. This is especially true because most bus routes serve
densely populated urban areas that get the heaviest traffic. BRT remedies this disadvantage by using a
dedicated lane and avoiding
traffic, as I have already mentioned.
But there other less obvious reasons that explain why a bus trip is slower than a subway ride that covers exactly the same distance. They include the bus's means of fare collection, its tendency to make too many stops and board passengers through elevated platforms that require climbing stairways. These limitations of the bus and the way BRT service remedies them are explained in depth below.
A.
Fare collection: People who get on trains have already paid their fare when they entered the station. People boarding buses, however, drop their change into the coin slot one by one as they come in. For that reason, buses
waste a lot of time standing immobile that trains do not. BRT remedies this situation by installing
automatic fare collection systems at
bus stations.
B.
Number of stops: Trains have a much lower number of stops per mile than buses. A bus may have to stop twice in a period of seconds to
pick up passengers at two stops less than a quarter of a mile distance from each other. To remedy this, a BRT system limits the number of
bus stops so that buses spend less time picking up passengers and more time driving along their
route. And that improves
travel time for everyone.
C.
Entrance method: A train's floor is on the same level as the
platform. Hence: a passenger can walk into the train right through the doors. A bus, however, often forces passengers to
climb a set of stairs to get onto the bus from the street stop. This means that buses must spend more time
boarding passengers than trains. The BRT solution to this disadvantage of the bus is
low-height buses that are level with the ground so that less
stair-climbing is required.