Abstract

There is world-wide interest for the implementation of bus priority corridors and the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) approach. The authors present an overview of existing bus-based priority corridors in the American continent based on information included in the BRTdata.org database, which comprises 116 attributes and indicators. Curitiba is considered the cradle of BRT, but it was after the start of TransMilenio that the concept caught the attention of cities interested in high-performance bus transit. Every day in the American continent, approximately 18 million passengers are transported along 186 bus priority corridors of different design configurations or standards; there are, also, over 150 projects of bus-based priority corridors planned or under construction. The authors present country-based quantitative analyses of the number of cities and corridors, as well as the daily passenger demands and the priority extensions. The authors examined the incidence of physical elements that directly impact the performance of bus-based urban transit systems in terms of speed and capacity. The authors demonstrate that few bus corridors were specifically designed for serving high passenger demands. Physical elements and operational schemes impose restrictions and, as consequence, 59% of the bus priority corridors exhibit average operating speeds below 20 km/h.