On a recent weekday evening, buses of all kinds were packed even before picking up passengers on a road near the Moolchand metro station in New Delhi. Higher-speed buses did not look noticeably different from regular ones and, after taking on more riders, several types of buses entered a designated mass-transit lane — and then promptly shared it with cars, motorcycles, and a screaming ambulance.
欢迎来到新德里的“巴士快速运输”或BRT，该计划是一项旨在帮助缓解交通拥堵，鼓励使用公共交通的计划13.8 million。But Delhi’s six-year-old BRT project has run into numerous snags, including the incursion of cars and other vehicles into the BRT lanes — a development that can defeat the purpose of a system designed to be faster than general traffic. City officials once hoped to create 14 additional BRT corridors, but the system hasnot expanded超越了其就职3.6英里。
“It connects Delhi in a good manner,” said Akshya Saxena, a passenger standing near a bus rapid transit platform amid rush-hour traffic. But he added with a sigh, “In India, everything becomes controversial.”
自2007年以来，印度的运输规划师通过向拥挤的大城市引入高速公共汽车进行了雄心勃勃的实验。他们在类似的系统上建立了BRT网络的建模，并具有指定的高速车道，这些车道为世界各地的城市交通网格带来了无数好处，包括波哥大，德黑兰和中国的几个城市。
‘It connects Delhi in a good manner, [but] in India everything becomes controversial,’ says one passenger.
International transportation experts havepraiseda handful of BRT networks in India — especially a system in the northwestern Indian city of Ahmedabad — for reducing congestion and paving the way for long-term CO2 emissions reductions. But high-speed bus systems in Delhi and some other cities have grown slowly for a variety of reasons. One is that urban real estate development in densely populated India is often so fragmented and decentralized that city governments find it difficult to retrofit busy districts with high-speed bus lanes and related infrastructure, according to Indian urban planners.
In addition, the transportation bureaucracy in India’s sprawling democracy — the largest on the planet — is notoriously diffuse and uncoordinated, posing a barrier to effective implementation and maintenance of buses or other methods of mass transit. Car owners have actively resisted BRT because extra bus lanes take away road space from mixed traffic. And across India, the concept of BRT is竞争与许多拟议的地铁系统一起资金。此外，根据德里的运输专家的说法，德里的BRT系统遭受了城市机构的公共关系工作不足的困扰，并在印度新闻媒体上对其苦难的轰动性承保范围。
Proponents say that bus rapid transit systems are essential in this rapidly urbanizing country of 1.2 billion people, where a third of the population lives in cities and car ownership has soared in recent decades. Although India’s per-capita vehicle ownership rates are still远低于the global average, the country has gone from having fewer than 1 million vehicles on the road in 1961 to今天大约有1.2亿, according to the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. To avoid worsening gridlock and air pollution, urban planners say India must leapfrog from a largely rural society to a postmodern one with high rates of public-transit usage, cycling, and walking.
Although India’s BRT systems are growing, they have made only a small dent in an increasingly car-centric landscape.
However, there is sharp disagreement among Indian experts over BRT’s potential and the role it should play in Delhi and beyond. Some contend that BRT only works well when roads are wide enough so lanes can be set aside for high-speed buses, and that BRT’s purported environmental benefits are debatable. Others insist that, despite BRT’s global profile, India’s cities will require more comprehensive transport reform over the long term. BRT planners “want a project that is shiny,” Dinesh Mohan, a senior transportation expert at the德里印度理工学院，在一次采访中说。“我对此不感兴趣。我希望德里的所有公共汽车乘客更加舒适。”
E. Sreedharan, former managing director of theDelhi Metro Rail Corporation，认为BRT的潜在有效性和环境利益被夸大了。他在一封电子邮件采访中说：“ BRT在德里和浦那都是完全失败的。”他补充说，BRT“可能是针对少于一百万人口的小城市的短期解决方案，但对于较大的城市，“基于铁路的大众运输是不可避免的”。
BRT first gained notice in the 1970s inBrazil后来遍布世界各地。根据2002年之后，全球运行的160多个BRT或“高质量巴士走廊”中的45个以外的所有人都在embarq, a Washington-based transportation advocacy group. Many experts view BRT as a logical solution to a range of municipal transportation problems in developed and developing countries, contending that the systems enhance road safety and promote walking, often carry at least as many passengers as regular bus systems, and are far cheaper to build than metros.
But BRT is still a relatively young concept, and BRT projects regularly hit speed bumps in their planning and implementation. Dario Hidalgo, a transport expert with EMBARQ in Bogotá who has评估Delhi’s BRT, says typical obstacles include a difficulty in establishing bus lanes, jurisdictional overlaps between city agencies, competing fleets of privately owned “incumbent” bus services, and a lack of expertise among planning agencies charged with implementing high-speed service and infrastructure.
BRT在艾哈迈达巴德取得了成功，部分原因是早期车道是在相对未开发的地区建造的。
Hidalgo补充说，印度的BRT实验面临着独特的挑战。他解释说，引入BRT系统的拉丁美洲城市已经具有强大的公共巴士网络，对更高速度的城市进行了相对容易的转换，而印度城市通常充满了骑自行车的人和三轮汽车人力车。
Hidalgo says that even though India’s BRT systems are growing steadily —seven extensive BRT systems now operate nationwide and several others are in the planning stages — they have made only a small dent on India’s increasingly car-centric transportation landscape. “The big challenge for India is if they keep motorizing, they will face enormous difficulties,” he says, including the exacerbation of an already severe air pollution problem.
Indeed, the 2014Yale Environmental Performance指数将177位的178个国家排除在178个国家中，接受了平均接触细颗粒物的调查。根据世界卫生组织的标准，经常认为德里的空气被认为是危险的。德里和许多其他印度城市的这种污染对全球环境有直接影响：根据联合国环境计划（UNEP），印度与运输连接的温室气体排放 - 2007年是7.5％在该国的总排放中，预计到2050年将急剧上升。
India’s first BRT system was launched in the western city of Pune in 2007, a year before Delhi’s. Since then, the city of Ahmedabad has emerged as a leader in the country’s BRT movement. After BRT launched there in 2009, the high-speed bus lane network grew from about 3 to 50 miles, according to Shivanand Swamy of theCenter for Environmental Planning and Technology in Ahmedabad。His research suggests that the Ahmedabad BRT system carries8,000 to 12,000people per hour, and that both buses and individual vehicles have benefitted because the buses carry people who might otherwise commute in mixed traffic. Swamy says the city’s regular-speed buses are now being phased out as the BRT network expands, in part because the city is trying to appeal to middle-class riders who might otherwise be tempted to drive.
他解释说：“随着更多的汽车进入，我们的道路容量将会降低。”“如果您真的想与两轮车和四轮摩托车竞争，则需要给出优质的选择。”
One expert says the media’s skeptical response to BRT was a “high-decibel attack” that hurt chances of success.
Swamy says other Indian cities — including Surat and Indore — are now following Ahmedabad’s example of developing sophisticated marketing and a “closed” system in which BRT buses are more insulated from general traffic than they are in “open” systems like Delhi’s. Other experts note that BRT has succeeded in Ahmedabad partly because early lanes were built in relatively undeveloped districts, allowing local planners to essentially create the road grid from scratch.
经过contrast, BRT launches in Delhi and Pune have struggled because of opposition from car owners and a lack of institutional coordination. Delhi’s
BRT woes intensified in 2012 after an activist filed alawsuitclaiming the system had unfairly taken road space from cars. As the case moved through Delhi’s high court, a judge订购the BRT lanes opened to general traffic — a move that was laterreversed，但在损害BRT的声誉之前不会。德里印度理工学院的迪内什·莫汉（Dinesh Mohan）为中央政府提供交通运输，他说，印度媒体对BRT的持怀疑态度是“高贝贝尔袭击”，严重损害了该系统成功的机会。
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BRT buses and subway systems are now being刻画在印度报纸上，作为对抗市政资金的对手。新兴的叙述是，地铁暗示着城市发展的精英标准，阿米特·巴特（Amit Bhatt）表示，印度Embarq India综合城市运输策略负责人。他说，较小的印度城市的人们正在大声疾呼地铁，尽管BRT通常是遥远的cheaper比大都市作为资本投资更有效。
最终，运输专家说，BRT不是银弹，而是包括Metros在内的众多工具之一，计划人员可能会用来改善印度城市过境基础设施，战斗空气污染和阻止使用汽车的使用。
The government has funded $4 billion worth of urban transport projects since 2006 — including roughly $840 million for BRT systems — and more funding is in the pipeline, according to EMBARQ. S.K. Lohia, the former head of India’s urban transport department, points out that when the country’s transport reforms began eight years ago, only 20 of its cities had municipal bus service. The reforms have so far been impressive, he says, “but we have to create conditions so that BRT comes as a natural thing, rather than something that is imposed.”
更正：2014年5月9日：本文的较早版本错误地指出了艾哈迈达巴德BRT系统在高峰时间每小时运载的乘客人数。正确的数字是8,000至12,000名乘客。