Bus service given metro-like speed and reliability through dedicated lanes, prepaid boarding and signal priority — pioneered in Curitiba in 1974.
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Bus rapid transit (BRT) aims to give buses the speed and reliability of a metro at a fraction of the cost. The trick is to strip out what slows ordinary buses: BRT runs in dedicated lanes physically separated from cars, riders pay before boarding at enclosed stations, and buses get priority at traffic lights and board level with the platform.
The idea was born in Curitiba, Brazil, in 1974, and the city still runs one of the template systems — its RIT network carries millions of trips a day, uses contactless smart cards, and fits its fleet with live telemetry to track routes and delays. Done well, BRT moves tens of thousands of passengers per hour in each direction; the ITDP publishes a BRT Standard that scores corridors on how many of these features they genuinely include.
The caveat is that 'BRT' is often diluted: paint a bus lane, call it BRT, and quietly skip the separated lanes or prepaid boarding that make it work. Buses also share the road's air-quality problem unless the fleet is cleaned up — which is why cities increasingly pair BRT with electrification, as Shenzhen did by switching all 16,000 of its buses to electric.
ITDP wrote the BRT Standard that this glossary entry defines the term against, and the video walks the physical elements — dedicated lane, level boarding, off-board fare collection — that decide whether a corridor scores as BRT at all. The distinction is hard to picture from a definition and obvious in a video.
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Added 2026-07-16 · Part of the growing Smart City Glossary
