Prashanth Bachu

Hyderabad has lost $5.5 billion due to traffic congestion. This is five times the current GHMC approved budget.

There's a misconception that bus systems take off a lot of density off the road, and so it reduces congestion. The truth is far more nuanced. 1. BRTS superior demands on demand density. In dense corridors with high peak loads, metros and rails actually outperform BRTS. 2. BRTS makes sense where ridership is high enough to justify dedicated lanes, but not so high that buses saturate. 3. It only works if lanes are truly exclusive. If right-of-way can't be protected, BRT becomes a failure. Before I put in the math, let's understand what bus bunching is and what headway spacing is. Bus bunching up happens when small delays cause buses that were evenly spaced to clump up at the same bus stop together. Headway space is the gap between vehicles. If there's less headway space, then probability of buses bunching up increases. And that's inefficient. Based on practical experience, regular buses require 2-5 minutes of headway. That reduces to 60 seconds for BRTS. And that's why people think it is more efficient. You cannot push this below one minute. Transit math: Capacity = vehicles/hr × passengers/vehicle BRTS tops out ~15k pphpd before bunching. Bus capacity cannot be more than 200. And you can have at most 60 buses an hour. That gives you a max capacity of 12k passengers an hour. Metro does 40–70k+. For example, Mumbai Metro 1 can transport 65k passengers at peak hours. BRTS works, but really in very niche use cases. In most cases, in India, we're better off building metros.

Indore joins the list of cities dismantling its Bus Rapid Transit System(BRTS). BRTS was touted by lot of urban planners as model for urban mobility (remember couple of IIT profs even pitching it in Delhi as an alternative against metro) Perhaps the truth is that BRTS works on paper, not in cities where lanes are few, lane enforcement tend to be very weak, and mixed traffic is chaos. So BRTS kind of initiatives done to decongest often ends up choking roads.

Indore joins the list of cities dismantling its Bus Rapid Transit System(BRTS). BRTS was touted by lot of urban planners as model for urban mobility (remember couple of IIT profs even pitching it in Delhi as an alternative against metro) Perhaps the truth is that BRTS works on paper, not in cities where lanes are few, lane enforcement tend to be very weak, and mixed traffic is chaos. So BRTS kind of initiatives done to decongest often ends up choking roads.