Urban mass transit

Assembled from 19 blocks · 1 evidence · 26 related

1. Story
2. The set of systems that decide how large a labour market a city actually has, as opposed to how large it looks on a map. A city's effective size is not its built area but the area reachable within a tolerated commute, and transit is the only instrument that expands that without expanding road space proportionally. The choice between modes is largely a choice about capital cost, delivery time and right-of-way: heavy metro carries the most and costs the most and takes the longest to build; bus rapid transit buys a large fraction of metro-like capacity for a fraction of the cost, provided the right-of-way is genuinely segregated and enforced; cable-propelled transit is a niche answer to steep terrain. Global BRT data compiled at brtdata.org recorded, as of May 2025, about 191 cities operating BRT over roughly 5,900 kilometres of corridor carrying on the order of 32 million daily passengers, with Latin America accounting for the largest share of ridership. Transit is also the system where operating subsidy, not construction, usually decides survival.
3. Knowledge
4. Agglomeration
5. Urban mass transit
6. Connections
7. Agglomeration
8. Bus rapid transit
9. Metrocable Line K, Medellín
10. Lagos Blue Line
11. Municipal fiscal capacity
12. TransMilenio opens in Bogotá
13. The Lagos Blue Line carries its first passengers
14. Twenty-first-century urbanisation
15. Urban mass transit
16. Songdo
17. Songdo passes 200,000 residents — and stays short on jobs
18. Evidence
19. Supports the global BRT figures of about 191 cities, roughly 5,900 kilometres of corridor and on the order of 32 million daily passengers, with Latin America carrying the largest regional share. V55 verification basis: retrieved from platform summaries; the database was not queried directly, and other retrieved sources give somewhat different totals for 2024, which is why the figures are given as approximations.