California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

BRT mixes the flexibility of traditional bus transit service with an array of higher performance rail transit features. One of its advantages over rail, however, is its possibility for incremental and flexible deployment. With this flexibility and incremental nature comes a deployment process for BRT that is highly complex because numerous elements can be incorporated in any number of distinct phases. In almost all BRT deployments, ITS and advanced bus technologies have been applied to BRT, however, in less than a fully integrated manner. This project explores how deployment decisions can be made easier, perhaps more rational, and in a more integrated fashion by clarifying the relationships between different BRT elements, and how the different planning-level goals of deployment are affected by decisions regarding particular elements. Both a system architecture and a prototype visual tool have been developed, showing the relationships between and among common BRT elements and major decision areas.