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Exclusively buses
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Exclusively buses AN INNOVATIVE transportation system being used in a city in Southern Brazil may revolutionize the way people look at buses. In Curitiba, a city with 1.6 million inhabitants, the experience with a transportation system based exclusively on buses has proven that a bus system does not necessarily have to be slow. On the contrary, it can be as fast as a subway system and capable of carrying the same number of passengers. But with a tremendous advantage: it is 80 to 500 times less expensive to set up than the subway, depending on the kind of buses and bus stops chosen for each route, with different needs. Furthermore, a complete bus network can be implemented in months, compared to years for a subway line. And likewise, a bus network offers more flexibility if for any reason certain routes have to be changed. It is thus not wise to jump from a bus system to an underground system just because the volume of passengers is increasing. The example of Curitiba shows that there is still room for a lot of creativity, leading to improvements that can be used on the ground, within the field of bus transport. In this system, called Integrated Transportation Network, all bus lines interconnect. This permits the articulated operation of a network, with a total route length of 900 kilometers, already being nicknamed a "surface subway". Unheard of, but in each case simple, innovations have progressively improved Curitiba's system. Let us assume that an ordinary bus, running in the midst of normal traffic, can carry x passengers a day. If you give the bus an exclusive lane, it can carry 2x. If you use an articulated bus, it can carry 2.5x. If you make changes to permit loading and unloading of passengers at the same level as the bus, and have the fare paid in advance, you can carry 3.2x. And if you use a bi-articulated bus, you can carry 4x. And Curitiba has done all these. This transportation system started
being implemented in the early 70s according to a plan that directed the growth and economic development of the city along structural linear axes, instead of the typical urban sprawl. Those linear axes constitute the main transportation roads. In each of them a central lane is separated with concrete dividers from the normal traffic, serving as an exclusive bus lane, totalling 60 kilometers. These are complemented by 300 kilometers of "feeder" routes, which serve the purpose of concentrating passengers in strategically placed transport terminals, and 185 kilometers of inter-district lines interconnecting the terminal network. Running parallel to this whole system there are 250 kilometers of express lanes, where the "Ligeirinho", or Speed Buses, run, making stops at intervals averaging three kilometers each. At these stops, or terminals, people riding the local buses can make a transfer, or vice versa. One can compare the "Ligeirinho" with the express subway lines in New York. However, the difference is that we have "Ligeirinho" lines all over the city, reducing in half the commuting time of the inhabitants of Curitiba. Besides buses running on exclusive lanes and making fewer stops, a simple and innovative device has contributed to speeding up the bus: a glass-and-steel boarding station shaped like a tube, 10 metres long and 2.7 metres in diameter, which allows the fare purchase to take place at the level of the vehicle door, without the use of steps. Passengers pay their fares to a tube attendant while passing through a turnstile when boarding the tube. The tube attendant is also responsible for operating an elevator, present in every tube, which gives the physically handicapped access to the bus. The introduction of the tube stations, at an approximate cost of $40,000 each, made the passengerboarding process four times faster, permitting up to eight passengers to board per second. At the conventional
A view of the Curitiba demonstration project in New York, showing the bus and the tube at the bus stop.
stop, with steps to be climbed and fare purchase taking place inside the vehicle, the maximum boarding speed is two passengers per second. But the innovations in Curitiba didn't stop there. On the structural axes with higher demand, two different vehicles of greater capacity were introduced: the articulated buses, which can carry up to 160 passengers, and bi-articulated buses, which have a capacity of 270 passengers, being one of the largest buses in operation in the world. On these routes, 23,000 passengers are transported in one hour, approximately the same number of people as are carried by the Rio de Janeiro subway in an hour. The Speedy Buses, making stops every three kilometers, can reach a speed of 32 kilometers per hour, while the biarticulated buses, with stops at every 500 meters, reach a speed of 20 kilometers per hour, twice the speed of regular buses. It would seem unfair to compare the speed of the bus system in Curitiba with the speed of any subway system, since buses have to stop at crossings and stoplights which do not exist underground. But actually, the comparison is not unfavorable. The speed of the subway in New York City, for example, ranges from 25 to 32 kilometers per hour. And, sometimes it is even possible to save
Energy for Sustainable Development. Volume I No.3. September 1994
5
News
time using a bus system, if you consider the time it takes a passenger to transfer from one line to another. A transfer on the ground take a few seconds, while a transfer underground can take up to half an hour in certain subway stations. But even if there is a small difference between the speeds of a subway system and the Curitiba buses, it would be easily offset by a consideration of prices. The cost of implementing the Speedy Bus system is $200,000 per kilometer, 500 times less expensive than the cost per kilometer for the implementation of a subway system, internationally accepted as $100 million. For the bi-articulated bus route, the cost is $1.3 million per kilometer, 80 times less than the cost of the subway system. Since 1991, when the Speedy Bus lines were implemented, 28 per cent of the inhabitants of Curitiba who own cars have decided to leave them at horne to commute using the public transportation. Therefore, even though Curitiba has the second highest rate of car ownership per person in Brazil (one car for every three peopie), its public transportation system is the most used in Brazil: 75 percent of its commuters ride the buses on week days. As a result, Curitiba's gasoline use per capita is 30 percent below that of eight comparable Brazilian cities. For this achievement, Curitiba received an award in 1990 for promoting global energy efficiency from the Washington-based International Institute for Energy Conservation. When its first exclusive bus line was implemented, in 1974, Curitiba's transportation system served 27,000 passengers a day. Now, it serves 800,000 passengers, or half of the total population of the city. And, unlike in many cities in the world, in developed and developing countries, the Curitiba system does not need to be subsidized. Generally, one finds either a public transportation system that is entirely privatized and pays for itself, or a system that is publicly owned and doesn't pay for itself. In some cases the shortfall is not very much, and in some cases a lot, requiring large subsidies. In Curitiba there 6
is really a mixed system. In fact, Curitiba's Integrated Transport Network is managed by URBS (Urbanizacao de Curitiba S/A), a partially governmental company, but private companies operate the buses. URBS pays the companies according to the number of kilometers they operate, and it calculates the fare guaranteeing a monthly return for the bus companies
Even though Curitiba has the second highest rate of car ownership per person in Brazil (one car for every three people), its public transportation system is the most used in Brazil. of approximately 10 percent (of the fare collections), considering the capital they have invested in the bus fleet and their administrative costs. The fare has ranged from 20 to 40 cents within the last five years with unlimited transfers. Since the price paid per kilometer is the same for every company operating the buses, the company's profit will depend on its efficiency and productivity. In the Brazilian political system the use of private companies to operate buses is the only option. In a public operation the technicians are chosen by favoritism and not for their technical skills, creating a need for expensive consulting services, which increase the costs. In Curitiba, the government determines and controls the quality of service, the private companies are paid according to their efficiency and the commuters have the quality of their transportation services guaranteed. Helping to disseminate information on the Curitiba experience, the United Nations/World Bank Urban Management Program has recently released a paper on Environmental Innovation and Management in Curitiba, Brazil. This is part of a series which seeks to highlight examples of good practice in the various components of urban management and is distributed to urban managers and policy-makers worldwide.
Today it is very difficult, even for rich countries, to build a complete underground system. London, Paris, Moscow and New York were able to do it because they built their systems at the beginning of the century, when it was cheaper to build underground lines. Since then and in future any construction of rail transport systems would have to be on the ground for costs to not be prohibitive. In fact, cities in developed countries such as New York, Vancouver and Lyon, are also turning to Curitiba to fmd solutions for their transportation needs. Two years ago, the Speedy Bus operation was demonstrated in New York City for a period of six weeks during the months of April and May, using four buses and four tubes loaned by the city of Curitiba. The demonstration route was a 4kilometer loop in downtown Manhattan with stops at South Ferry, City Hall, the World Trade Center and the South Street Seaport, transporting almost 100,000 passengers during the experiment. During the demonstration passengers could ride free, and the city of New York spent a total of $263,000 to pay for the installation and maintenance of the tubes and operation and maintenance of the buses. If Curitiba's bus system is ever implemented on a large scale and a long-term basis in New York City, the enforcement of laws forbidding cars to park in front of bus stops will have to be more stringent. Under the current system, if a car is parked at a bus stop, the bus driver has the flexibility to stop at another place. This cannot happen with the tubes. The use of the Curitiba system would only be recommended on routes that serve a large number of passengers, since the savings resulting from increased efficiency in the system can be offset by the necessity of hiring personnel to staff the tubes. • Norberto Stavisky, Editor, Parana & Companhia, and Assessor from URBS (Urbanizacao de Curitiba SIA), Av. Presidente Afonso Camargo, sino, Curitiba-Parana, CEP-80060-090, Brazil.
Energy for Sustainable Development • Volume I No.3. September 1994
Exclusively buses AN INNOVATIVE transportation system being used in a city in Southern Brazil may revolutionize the way people look at buses. In Curitiba, a city with 1.6 million inhabitants, the experience with a transportation system based exclusively on buses has proven that a bus system does not necessarily have to be slow. On the contrary, it can be as fast as a subway system and capable of carrying the same number of passengers. But with a tremendous advantage: it is 80 to 500 times less expensive to set up than the subway, depending on the kind of buses and bus stops chosen for each route, with different needs. Furthermore, a complete bus network can be implemented in months, compared to years for a subway line. And likewise, a bus network offers more flexibility if for any reason certain routes have to be changed. It is thus not wise to jump from a bus system to an underground system just because the volume of passengers is increasing. The example of Curitiba shows that there is still room for a lot of creativity, leading to improvements that can be used on the ground, within the field of bus transport. In this system, called Integrated Transportation Network, all bus lines interconnect. This permits the articulated operation of a network, with a total route length of 900 kilometers, already being nicknamed a "surface subway". Unheard of, but in each case simple, innovations have progressively improved Curitiba's system. Let us assume that an ordinary bus, running in the midst of normal traffic, can carry x passengers a day. If you give the bus an exclusive lane, it can carry 2x. If you use an articulated bus, it can carry 2.5x. If you make changes to permit loading and unloading of passengers at the same level as the bus, and have the fare paid in advance, you can carry 3.2x. And if you use a bi-articulated bus, you can carry 4x. And Curitiba has done all these. This transportation system started
being implemented in the early 70s according to a plan that directed the growth and economic development of the city along structural linear axes, instead of the typical urban sprawl. Those linear axes constitute the main transportation roads. In each of them a central lane is separated with concrete dividers from the normal traffic, serving as an exclusive bus lane, totalling 60 kilometers. These are complemented by 300 kilometers of "feeder" routes, which serve the purpose of concentrating passengers in strategically placed transport terminals, and 185 kilometers of inter-district lines interconnecting the terminal network. Running parallel to this whole system there are 250 kilometers of express lanes, where the "Ligeirinho", or Speed Buses, run, making stops at intervals averaging three kilometers each. At these stops, or terminals, people riding the local buses can make a transfer, or vice versa. One can compare the "Ligeirinho" with the express subway lines in New York. However, the difference is that we have "Ligeirinho" lines all over the city, reducing in half the commuting time of the inhabitants of Curitiba. Besides buses running on exclusive lanes and making fewer stops, a simple and innovative device has contributed to speeding up the bus: a glass-and-steel boarding station shaped like a tube, 10 metres long and 2.7 metres in diameter, which allows the fare purchase to take place at the level of the vehicle door, without the use of steps. Passengers pay their fares to a tube attendant while passing through a turnstile when boarding the tube. The tube attendant is also responsible for operating an elevator, present in every tube, which gives the physically handicapped access to the bus. The introduction of the tube stations, at an approximate cost of $40,000 each, made the passengerboarding process four times faster, permitting up to eight passengers to board per second. At the conventional
A view of the Curitiba demonstration project in New York, showing the bus and the tube at the bus stop.
stop, with steps to be climbed and fare purchase taking place inside the vehicle, the maximum boarding speed is two passengers per second. But the innovations in Curitiba didn't stop there. On the structural axes with higher demand, two different vehicles of greater capacity were introduced: the articulated buses, which can carry up to 160 passengers, and bi-articulated buses, which have a capacity of 270 passengers, being one of the largest buses in operation in the world. On these routes, 23,000 passengers are transported in one hour, approximately the same number of people as are carried by the Rio de Janeiro subway in an hour. The Speedy Buses, making stops every three kilometers, can reach a speed of 32 kilometers per hour, while the biarticulated buses, with stops at every 500 meters, reach a speed of 20 kilometers per hour, twice the speed of regular buses. It would seem unfair to compare the speed of the bus system in Curitiba with the speed of any subway system, since buses have to stop at crossings and stoplights which do not exist underground. But actually, the comparison is not unfavorable. The speed of the subway in New York City, for example, ranges from 25 to 32 kilometers per hour. And, sometimes it is even possible to save
Energy for Sustainable Development. Volume I No.3. September 1994
5
News
time using a bus system, if you consider the time it takes a passenger to transfer from one line to another. A transfer on the ground take a few seconds, while a transfer underground can take up to half an hour in certain subway stations. But even if there is a small difference between the speeds of a subway system and the Curitiba buses, it would be easily offset by a consideration of prices. The cost of implementing the Speedy Bus system is $200,000 per kilometer, 500 times less expensive than the cost per kilometer for the implementation of a subway system, internationally accepted as $100 million. For the bi-articulated bus route, the cost is $1.3 million per kilometer, 80 times less than the cost of the subway system. Since 1991, when the Speedy Bus lines were implemented, 28 per cent of the inhabitants of Curitiba who own cars have decided to leave them at horne to commute using the public transportation. Therefore, even though Curitiba has the second highest rate of car ownership per person in Brazil (one car for every three peopie), its public transportation system is the most used in Brazil: 75 percent of its commuters ride the buses on week days. As a result, Curitiba's gasoline use per capita is 30 percent below that of eight comparable Brazilian cities. For this achievement, Curitiba received an award in 1990 for promoting global energy efficiency from the Washington-based International Institute for Energy Conservation. When its first exclusive bus line was implemented, in 1974, Curitiba's transportation system served 27,000 passengers a day. Now, it serves 800,000 passengers, or half of the total population of the city. And, unlike in many cities in the world, in developed and developing countries, the Curitiba system does not need to be subsidized. Generally, one finds either a public transportation system that is entirely privatized and pays for itself, or a system that is publicly owned and doesn't pay for itself. In some cases the shortfall is not very much, and in some cases a lot, requiring large subsidies. In Curitiba there 6
is really a mixed system. In fact, Curitiba's Integrated Transport Network is managed by URBS (Urbanizacao de Curitiba S/A), a partially governmental company, but private companies operate the buses. URBS pays the companies according to the number of kilometers they operate, and it calculates the fare guaranteeing a monthly return for the bus companies
Even though Curitiba has the second highest rate of car ownership per person in Brazil (one car for every three people), its public transportation system is the most used in Brazil. of approximately 10 percent (of the fare collections), considering the capital they have invested in the bus fleet and their administrative costs. The fare has ranged from 20 to 40 cents within the last five years with unlimited transfers. Since the price paid per kilometer is the same for every company operating the buses, the company's profit will depend on its efficiency and productivity. In the Brazilian political system the use of private companies to operate buses is the only option. In a public operation the technicians are chosen by favoritism and not for their technical skills, creating a need for expensive consulting services, which increase the costs. In Curitiba, the government determines and controls the quality of service, the private companies are paid according to their efficiency and the commuters have the quality of their transportation services guaranteed. Helping to disseminate information on the Curitiba experience, the United Nations/World Bank Urban Management Program has recently released a paper on Environmental Innovation and Management in Curitiba, Brazil. This is part of a series which seeks to highlight examples of good practice in the various components of urban management and is distributed to urban managers and policy-makers worldwide.
Today it is very difficult, even for rich countries, to build a complete underground system. London, Paris, Moscow and New York were able to do it because they built their systems at the beginning of the century, when it was cheaper to build underground lines. Since then and in future any construction of rail transport systems would have to be on the ground for costs to not be prohibitive. In fact, cities in developed countries such as New York, Vancouver and Lyon, are also turning to Curitiba to fmd solutions for their transportation needs. Two years ago, the Speedy Bus operation was demonstrated in New York City for a period of six weeks during the months of April and May, using four buses and four tubes loaned by the city of Curitiba. The demonstration route was a 4kilometer loop in downtown Manhattan with stops at South Ferry, City Hall, the World Trade Center and the South Street Seaport, transporting almost 100,000 passengers during the experiment. During the demonstration passengers could ride free, and the city of New York spent a total of $263,000 to pay for the installation and maintenance of the tubes and operation and maintenance of the buses. If Curitiba's bus system is ever implemented on a large scale and a long-term basis in New York City, the enforcement of laws forbidding cars to park in front of bus stops will have to be more stringent. Under the current system, if a car is parked at a bus stop, the bus driver has the flexibility to stop at another place. This cannot happen with the tubes. The use of the Curitiba system would only be recommended on routes that serve a large number of passengers, since the savings resulting from increased efficiency in the system can be offset by the necessity of hiring personnel to staff the tubes. • Norberto Stavisky, Editor, Parana & Companhia, and Assessor from URBS (Urbanizacao de Curitiba SIA), Av. Presidente Afonso Camargo, sino, Curitiba-Parana, CEP-80060-090, Brazil.
Energy for Sustainable Development • Volume I No.3. September 1994