The Challenge of Low-Carbon Development - World Bank Internet ...

The challenges to bus rapid transit includecompeting demand for road space, lack ofcoordination between neighboring cities,and opposition by taxi and private minibusowners.The BRT experienceAmong WBG-supported programs, the BRTSs that aremost developed are those of Bogota and Mexico City. Inboth cases, the WBG worked with willing clients, who hadalready concluded that BRTS was a desirable alternative.In Bogota (box 4.1), a sequence of learning-by-doingloans totaling $887 million (together with non-Bank carbonrevenues) supported expansion of BRT corridors andtheir integration into a citywide trunk and feeder system,with attention to bikeways and pedestrians. Systemexpansion was complemented with serious demand-sidemeasures, including doubling parking fees, boosting thegasoline tax, and restricting car travel during peak hours.Cooperatives were formed to offer employment to the formerbus drivers as part of the new feeder routes. Companiesparticipating in the new routes were required to scrapfour to nine old buses for each new articulated bus addedto the system.Box 4.1The TransMilenio BRTSWithout an explicit goal to reduce CO 2emissions, the World Bank has been financing urban transport projects inBogota since the mid-1990s and has contributed to the development of Bogota’s TransMilenio BRT system. One ofthe earliest programs of Bank support for a BRTS, this is an example of learning by doing.Under the first Bank-funded Urban Transport Project, the World Bank helped finance traffic management systemsalong existing bus ways and connecting roads to improve the traffic throughput to an existing BRT corridor.This project also funded background studies that led to the development of a better parking policy for the city.According to the project completion report, this effort more than doubled average bus speeds, boosting themfrom an initial 12 kilometers per hour to 27 kilometers per hour post-project.The second project, the $130 million Bogota Urban Services, was designed to help implement the secondcorridor in the BRTS and promote nonmotorized traffic (an extensive network of bike paths). A third project, the$757 million Integrated Mass Transit System, was designed to support the critical second (post-demonstration)phase of Bogota’s BRTS as a citywide integrated trunk-and-feeder system with 14 additional corridors andan integrated fare system, and to introduce a number of transport demand-management initiatives. Mostimportantly, the Integrated Mass Transit System expanded BRTSs to five other cities, replicating the experienceof Bogota but tailoring it to specific conditions of those selected cities.By 2004, Bogota’s BRTS already consisted of 58 kilometers of dedicated bus ways and 309 kilometers of feederroutes and moved more than 800,000 passengers per day. According to Wright (2004), carbon emissions reductionhas been achieved through a combination of improved public transport and the introduction of complementarytransport demand management policies to discourage the use of private vehicles and roadway space. The20 percent increase in gasoline taxes, 100 percent increase in parking fees, and restriction on private car travelduring peak hours are said to have reduced car traffic by 40 percent per day.Wright and Fulton (2005) list the key factors contributing to emission reduction:• Replacing four to five smaller buses with larger articulated buses and requiring the destruction of four toeight older buses for every new articulated vehicle introduced into the system; articulated buses are more fuelefficient per passenger-kilometer traveled.• Increasing the vehicle load factor to approximately 80–90 percent by implementing global positioning systemcontrolledmanagement of the fleet, allowing the optimization of demand and supply during peak and nonpeakhours.• Enforcing emission standards, requiring buses to be EURO II emission level–compliant.• Increasing the share of public transport ridership in total transit. By 2002, the share of private car and taxi trips intotal trips was said to have been reduced from 19.7 to 17.5 percent and the share of public transit trips increasedfrom 67 to 68 percent (Karekezi, Majaro, and Johnson 2003).One of the main barriers to system expansion was resistance to expansion of the BRT from current bus owners—anissue endemic to BRT implementation. The two corridors of Phase I of the TransMilenio BRT were designed tomeet only about 10 percent of the public transportation demand, with the remaining 90 percent being met50 | Climate Change and the World Bank Group