How effective will a BRT system going to be in Santiago de Chile? Case studies

by Ramirez-Bernal, Maria Fernanda

Urban transportation in third world countries has always been a political and economic issue. Not only because of the strong necessity it represents but because of the tendency of these places to copy first world projects regardless of the required National capital or the population attitude change that such investments require. For these countries it is important to understand that these solutions are not always the most adequate; not only because of the investment of capital but because of the environmental and social impacts have these approaches implies. Several countries around the world have attempted to solve the transportation problem, some of them have succeeded and some others have discovered flaws in their approaches. This research project considers two cities that are considered successful by using the same system, a Bus Rapid Transit System (articulated buses). One of them, Curitiba, has been using the solution for more than twenty years and the other one, Bogota, is almost ten years old. If this is true, the application of the same system into a similar situation will be just as effective, in other words, if the traffic situation in Santiago de Chile is just as inadequate as Curitiba and Bogota where, the solution will be just as good. The primary objective is to answer the question: what would have happened if the BRT system was never implemented in these two cities? The proposed methodology is to compare the congestion levels with and without the BRT systems, measured as number of private vehicles per capita and number of buses per capita in both cities. The WITH situation is determined by demographic data, but the WITHOUT situation requires development of a regression model to project historic measurements to the point where the transportation system was implemented in each one of the cities. Both models were developed with correlation factors higher than 95%, which means that they represent reality in a very close manner. Once the data is projected it is possible to compare data tendencies. In this case, both cities show lower Congestion Levels after the new system started to work. This means, from the approach of the planner that the proposed system was effective and its application in the Similar Environment is most adequate. From the transportation engineering approach, the results are positive and this marks a step toward a more defined exercise, which is, to gather more information to be able to develop a more detailed study using both cities transportation networks and be able to measure additional quantities like travel times and delays.