Bus Rapid Transit

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT for short) is a high quality bus service by featuring buses on dedicated infrastructure.

General description

Bus Rapid Transit is a special type of bus service which focuses on providing a high quality bus service for the passengers. Such quality is achieved through a mixture of a fast travel time (e.g. bus lanes, signal priority, grade separation), high frequency, high quality platforms (e.g. level boarding, off-board fare collection) and branching.

In fact, the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy has defined a standard policy which classifies Bus Rapid Transit in a mixture of infrastructure (e.g. bus lanes), service (e.g. frequency) and external factors like bicycle integration (e.g. bicycle parking) with at least least 3 kilometres (roughly 1.9 miles) of dedicated infrastructure. The ITDP also also ranks BRTs according to their quality and assigns them to three different tiers (gold, silver and bronze).

Bus Rapid Transit and OpenStreetMap

There are various methods to depict BRTs on OpenStreetMap, most notably in the infrastructure mapping like bus lanes but also services which can be used as a guidance for BRT classification. However, certain classifications are unverifiable (e.g. passenger use) or simply can't be easily modelled on OSM (e.g. number of doors per bus) and as such, OpenStreetMap is not a resource to directly classify Bus Rapid Transit.

Infrastructure

A list of typical features of Bus Rapid Transit which can be depicted on OpenStreetMap:

• Bus lanes - A lane dedicated (and usually exclusively) for buses. The most simple infrastructure where buses are on the same carriageway as cars and other vehicles but drive along rather than with them.
• highway=busway - A transport corridor for buses. The most common use of it are physically separated bus lanes (e.g. by kerb), although a bus-ROW can also exist as it own way. Introduced to OSM because of BRTs first and foremost but has been expanded to included non-BRT busways as well.
• highway=bus_guideway - A unique highway type in which the ROW is built as "rails" instead of a flat surface and physically only allows vehicles which can fit onto these rails.
• highway=platform - Because many BRTs put higher quality infrastructure than regular buses, most BRTs have dedicated platforms (sometimes by design, most notably centre bus lanes and island platforms). In fact, certain BRTs use high-floor buses which can only be used at specific platforms with a similarly high floor (the height of these can be specified in height=* analogous to how the platform height for railway=platform is specified with height=*).
• bus_bay=* - Bus bays are sometimes used on busways to allow non-local buses to skip stations.

Routes

Currently, there are no ways to distinguish between regular bus routes and BRTs. A proposal was drafted to tag BRTs on OSM as brt=yes but it has been changed to backbone=* to include other important buses which may or may not be BRT.

Some are of the opinion that BRTs are unverifiable since many so-called BRTs ended up being no better than regular buses and conversely, certain non-BRTs fulfil many criteria of the aforementioned BRT Standard but never got a formal classification.

Nonetheless, there are OSM tags which can still be used to depict the BRT Standard for services:

• opening_hours=* - specifies the operating hours of the buses
• interval=* - specifies for long a passenger has to wait for an upcoming bus
• duration=* - specifies how long a single ride usually takes (can be used with route members to specify average speeds).