7 min doc on Bogota's BRT system

[Hipster Duck]

I thought this was very interesting:

http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/bus-rapid-transit-bogota/

Among the highlights:

1. free neighbourhood feeder bus service directly to the terminals
2. advanced bike storage facilities with a great organizational system
3. 1.3M daily riders!

Some of the best transit planning seems to come out of Latin America these days. Bogota is also known for having an exemplary bicycle path system, which is also touched upon in this short documentary.

 

[JasonParis]

Wow, it's even a source of national pride!

Indeed, very interesting and something that could be transported to vast swaths of the GTA.

 

[afransen]

I couldn't get that site to stream properly, so here is the same file on youtube.

I'm pretty damned impressed. While this might not be practical for downtown (you'd need fairly wide streets or to close streets to car traffic), it seems like it could work remarkably well for getting around the burbs and funneling people to GO/subway stations. I'd say that this system, if more or less copied, would probably be better than LRT, as it makes it easier to feed into and to avoid bunching. Snow would probably kill average speeds more than for rail. It might be politically infeasible to chew up 3-5 lanes on suburban streets.

Seems to me that it might also be preferable to have the stations on the sidewalks to avoid all the pedestrians crossing to the median.

 

[Hipster Duck]

I'm pretty damned impressed. While this might not be practical for downtown (you'd need fairly wide streets or to close streets to car traffic), it seems like it could work remarkably well for getting around the burbs and funneling people to GO/subway stations. I'd say that this system, if more or less copied, would probably be better than LRT, as it makes it easier to feed into and to avoid bunching.

I agree and, to add, I would advocate this sort of system over Transit City's collection of LRT lines running on city streets. You're right that it would need fairly wide streets so I think that something like this would be ideal for the Finch Hydro Corridor. One of the biggest drawbacks of TC was Steve Munro's insistence that a Hydro corridor was not a proper place to put a transit line and yet as this video demonstrates, 1.3 million people ride a system that mostly travels in freeway medians. The answer lies in providing sufficient connections to the termini, whether in the form of free feeder bus services or truly advanced bicycle paths.

Once there, the speed gains are truly astounding. 40 km/h average speeds for buses within a city are almost unheard of.