Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Bus Rapid Transit

If you're a Bus Rapid Transit believer, here's the dream - a commute around town that is as efficient as a train without the cost of finding the land, laying the tracks, acquiring the train cars and building the stations, the park-and-ride lots and the highway overpasses to get to them (a process, as many discouraged commuters know, that takes years and years and years).

Creating train-like bus routes just sounds so much easier. Since 2008, Phoenix, Kansas City, New York, and Cleveland have all implemented BRT systems. Chicago is mulling one now. Worldwide, the concept is taking off, too. 134 cities – half of them in Latin America – now have such corridors, spanning more than 3,000 kilometers of urban bus routes from Zaozhuang, China to Guadalajara, Mexico.