Betting Big on Mexico City's Metrobus Rapid Transit Shooka Shemirani and Mao Pengfei - Xinhua
go to original May 5, 2015

Mexico City Metrobús (EMBARQ)

In the early summer of 2005, Mexico City motorists were more than skeptical as workers placed bright yellow traffic lane dividers along one of the capital's main arteries, Insurgentes Avenue.

The city was about to launch its first bus rapid transit (BRT) line and the yellow markers signaled that the inside lane of the avenue would soon be a no-go zone for all other vehicles.

"They're taking away a lane!" an angry taxi driver complained at the time. To most drivers, reserving a lane exclusively for the novel mass transit system seemed counterintuitive. They wanted more blacktop to relieve bumper-to-bumper traffic, not less.

But over the past decade, the system, here called Metrobus, has proven to work and in Mexico City's drive to improve its mass transit network, BRT is playing a starring role.

Before the Metrobus marks its 10th anniversary on June 19, the city plans to launch its sixth route. In another year or two, the network will mark another milestone when its buses make their debut on the city's fashionable Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico's answer to the Champs Elysees.

...At least another five or six lines are planned as Mexico City looks to approximately double its BRT network from the current 120 km to over 200 km. Mexico's experience with BRT, it would seem, has been a success.

Read the rest at GlobalPost

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