The following question was recently posted on Quora:
“What are the best public transportation systems in the world and why?”
Read the answers below:
Yousaf Shah, Urban Planning Consultant:
You assess systems based on their ability to meet the planning and infrastructure goals set when it was planned.
Here’s a link to a paper I wrote about performance measurement and benchmarking for urban transportation, comparing the systems of 63 cities around the world. It’s since been published in the Transportation Research Record journal: http://tram.mcgill.ca/Research/P...
Or if TL:DR - Here’s a chart I made graphing the performance of each city according to size and GDP
Francis Chen, Urban Planner:
Brazil at the time was a developing country. At the time, Curitiba did not have the resources like New York, London, or Paris to build an extensive heavy rail system.
At the time, traffic congestion was growing in Curitiba as more and more people began purchasing cars. In the 1960s, It took the political foresight of the mayor, Jamie Lerner, to push for this innovative system.
Cities around the world such as Bogota, San Francisco, New York, Portland, Chicago, Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Seoul, Taipei, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Lahore, Istanbul, have learned or are continuing to learn more about how to expand this system into their cities.
A bus rapid transit system map below:
I recommend the 4-minute video below by EMBARQ, an international think-tank headquartered in Washington DC, on Curitiba’s BRT system.
Curitiba’s BRT system heavily factored land use in mind, planning it’s corridors on dense urban land use.
A picture or Curitiba below:
Inside of a bus stop: looks just like a metro system, except, it’s a bus system.