Ricardo Giesen

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has grown fast in the last 25 years, promising low-cost, rapid implementation, and large positive impacts. Despite advances, many systems in middle- and low-income countries face operational and financial issues, particularly in Latin America. Some practitioners, researchers, and decision makers, and the media are questioning its ability to provide quality services. Is this the end of a trend? To answer this question, this paper explores the status of the BRT industry and literature on the topic, with a focus on Latin America, as well as the emblematic cases of Curitiba, Quito, Bogotá, Mexico, and Santiago. Overcrowding, lack of reliability, fare evasion, issues of safety and security, and poor maintenance are evident problems in these and other cities. They seem to be a result of institutional and financial constraints, as well as technical limitations of surface-based transit modes. BRT has been able to deliver high-capacity and fast and reliable services, but requires permanent management and investment to face growing demand and aging infrastructure and vehicles, just like rail systems do. In addition, attention needs to be provided to data, technology innovation, urban integration, and public participation to keep BRT as an integral part of multimodal high-quality sustainable mobility networks in the future.

Cities need a healthy public transport industry to attract users, so that they prefer sustainable mobility options. In a context with huge technological changes in all modes of transportation, it is critical that cities embrace new technologies to provide better and more efficient public transport services. In this chapter, we present an analysis of the impacts and opportunities for public transport systems of four technological trends in transportation. These are Autonomous, Connected, Electric and Shared (ACES) vehicles. We conclude that in order for ACES to benefit society, even though in some cases a free market competition might be enough, in many others a strong normative framework and public infrastructure would be needed. Moreover, we argue that setting this policy right might have important consequences for the efficiency, livability and sustainability of cities involved. We also discuss some of the challenges that these technological transitions might produce on public transport.

En este artículo se proponen, sobre la base de un análisis cualitativo y cuantitativo dos enfoques para recomendar la planificación de transporte masivo. A diferencia del documento 3167 del Consejo Nacional de Política Económica y Social (CONPES) que recomendó impulsar la planificación y construcción de sistemas de transporte masivo en ciudades de Colombia exclusivamente en base a la población, los dos enfoques propuestos incorporan variables adicionales que son determinantes de un mayor uso de transporte público. El primero es una combinación lineal de características sociodemográficas de las ciudades, que considera otras variables relevantes como Producto Interno Bruto (PIB), forma urbana y motorización, denominado “puntaje urbano”. El segundo se basa en la demanda existente en los sistemas de transporte público, ponderada por la densidad de viajes y la distancia recorrida, llamado “densidad potencial de demanda”. Si bien la evidencia estadística es escasa, ambos indicadores predicen de mejor manera la demanda en corredores existentes.

Summary: Frequency setting takes place at the strategic and tactical planning stages of public transportation systems. The problem consists in determining the time interval between subsequent vehicles for a given set of lines, taking into account interests of users and operators. The result of this stage is considered as input at the operational level. In general, the problem faced by planners is how to distribute a given fleet of buses among a set of given lines. The corresponding decisions determine the frequency of each line, which impacts directly on the waiting time of the users and operator costs. In this work, we consider frequency setting as the problem of minimizing simultaneously users' total travel time and fleet size, which represents the interest of operators. There is a trade‐off between these two measures; therefore, we face a multi‐objective problem. We extend an existing single‐objective formulation to account explicitly for this trade‐off, and propose a Tabu Search solving method to handle efficiently this multi‐objective variant of the problem. The proposed methodology is then applied to a real medium‐sized problem instance, using data of Puerto Montt, Chile. We consider two data sets corresponding to morning‐peak and off‐peak periods. The results obtained show that the proposed methodology is able to improve the current solution in terms of total travel time and fleet size. In addition, the proposed method is able to efficiently suggest (in computational terms) different trade‐off solutions regarding the conflicting objectives of users and operators. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.