Bus rapid transit

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A method rather than a vehicle: segregated running way, level boarding at enclosed stations, fare payment before boarding, and signal priority, which together give a bus most of the throughput characteristics of a light rail line at a fraction of the capital cost and a fraction of the construction time. Curitiba opened the first twenty kilometres of the system that became the model in 1974, built around the express bus lanes on the city's structural axes; Bogotá's TransMilenio, opened in 2000, demonstrated the model at metropolitan scale and is what carried it worldwide. Its cost advantage is also its political vulnerability. The running way is ordinary road surface, so it can be reclaimed for general traffic by a decision rather than by demolition, and the system depends on an operating subsidy and a fare that must both survive fuel-price shocks. Curitiba's own network illustrates this: daily ridership fell to a little over 710,000 in 2020 and had recovered to roughly 1.1 million by 2022, against a peak above 2 million in the mid-2010s.

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