Bus Systems, Interurban

Advantages of the Mode

Interurban bus systems in the United States have in recent decades passed through a time of consolidation and even near-monopoly in various metropolitan corridors and rural regions. More recently, however, a range of influences are providing the impetus for more imaginative and responsive operational approaches to thrive. These influences include but are not limited to overall population growth, inner-city revitalization, increasingly distant daily commuting destinations, pervasive highway congestion, rising fuel prices, economic uncertainty and constricted access to capital for major infrastructure investment, improvement of [Page 330]bus engines and fuel adaptability, expanding telecommunications capacity, and synergy in digital advances and dispatcher abilities.

There are further influences of a social and political nature. These feature the impetus for environmentally sounder, or sustainable, transportation solutions among urban, regional, and national planners. Also a factor is growing pragmatism on the part of elected officials at the local level when it comes to decision making, as evidenced by many progressive municipal ordinances—enacted regardless of the dominant political party affiliation of the locality—that encourage and invest in alternatives to nonsustainable energy, transport, and building methods.

Such changes and trends are evident in many parts of the world; it is not likely accidental or coincidental that numerous innovations in interurban and municipal bus systems have first been tested and refined in regions with less disposable income, fewer readily available resources, and less material abundance. Bus system innovation has been particularly marked in some of the developing world's major cities, such as Bogotá, Colombia; Quito, Ecuador; Lima, Peru; Curitiba, Brazil; and Guangzhou, China.

Researchers have pointed to the striking advantage bus operators have compared to transit systems that require considerable time and capital investment in infrastructure. Interurban bus systems can get up and running in a tiny fraction of the time it would take a rail operator, for example. Hand-in-glove with this advantage of speed to market, bus systems also have a fair amount of route flexibility built into their mode.

Bus systems in the interurban mode have some inherent advantages over automotive transport. Among these are a reduction in traffic congestion and the collective level of engine emissions, reduction in road accident fatalities, and the more general financial, environmental, and infrastructure benefits that flow from each of those reductions. The effective value of these advantages can often be enhanced by the use of such innovations as bus-only lanes, or busways. Road capacity is effectively increased in the case of some busways to levels that match rail capacity, as measured in terms of passenger-miles per minute. This is achieved by virtue of the average bus speed having increased and the average following distance being reduced safely and reliably through proper driver training, systems maintenance, and rule enforcement.

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