China Looks to Bus Rapid Transit Systems to Cope with Rapid Urbanization

Faced with a rapidly urbanizing population, China’s central government has set out to boost mass transit use in its largest cities to 60% from the current 35%. Yet with forecasts of up to 250 million cars on its roadways by 2025, China must seek innovative ways to tackle that goal. The recent success of the southern city of Guangzhou’s bus rapid transit system may provide part of the answer.

Guangzhou is “the industrial powerhouse of China,” says Jennifer Turner, ChinaFAQs expert and director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, producing about 60 percent of the world’s toys and about a fifth of all cell phones. However, as it fell victim to its own success, traffic from the growing number of commuters paralyzed the city.

To deal with the traffic problem, Guangzhou established its first bus rapid transit system by rolling out a 14-mile stretch of bus-only lanes down the middle of a main commuter thoroughfare.

Bus Rapid Transit is the name given to sophisticated bus systems that have their own dedicated lanes on city streets. These systems use bus stations instead of bus stops, a design feature that requires passengers to pay before boarding the bus. This allows for faster, more orderly boardings, similar to those of subway or light rail systems.

The Guangzhou project was the result of a partnership between the city’s mayor, Zhang Guangming, and a U.S.-headquartered nongovernmental organization, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). Despite grumblings from drivers, Guangming pushed ahead with the project, cutting 24 meters out of the middle of Zhongshan Avenue to make room for bus terminals. Today, Guangzhou’s BRT system beats out the ridership of every subway line in mainland China, handling 800,000 trips a day.

“The Chinese are understanding very well the challenge ahead. The challenge ahead is that with the growth of personal income and activity, there’s a greater need of mobility,” said Dario Hidalgo, senior transport engineer for EMBARQ, a group researching international transport at the World Resources Institute.

In the past two years, China has become the world’s fastest-growing market for high-speed city buses due in part to the relative simplicity of building BRT systems, which can be up and running in less than five years, compared to train systems that can take a decade or more. Today, about a dozen Chinese cities have working BRT systems, totaling 163 miles of dedicated busway and more than 350 stations.

For more, see “Chinese Cities Find Bus-Only Lanes an Alternative to Cars and Subways” by Saqib Rahim here.

Image courtesy of Karl Fjellstrom.