JUE insight: Efficiency of bus priority infrastructure

Abstract

We use bus GPS data across 500 routes to estimate the impact of priority infrastructure on buses’ speed and ridership in Chile. Almost 100 million bus trips allow us to leverage within-route variation in the proportion of the route in which buses travel along bus lanes or Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridors. Corridors increase bus speeds by 20% at peak hours. Bus lanes, often seen as an equally effective but cheaper alternative to a BRT corridor, are, on average, ineffective. However, bus lanes achieve the same travel time savings as BRT corridors only when fully isolated from private vehicles, coupled with monitoring cameras and enforcement.