A tour of transit systems around the world reveals a host of intelligent strategies worth deploying.
Mayors across the country, from New York to Seattle to Los Angeles to Boston, have promised to make buses faster and more useful to passengers. What we have seen in practice, however, is the steady diminution of the bus as travel speeds and ridership have declined over the last 20 years.
So how do we make good on these pledges to speed up the bus, made most prominently by New York City’s Zohran Mamdani? We argue that traffic management, specifically, how priority is applied to the bus, matters. By applying solutions that mitigate the sources of delay — namely road traffic and the amount of time buses spend idling at a bus stop, waiting for passengers to pay and board, sitting behind a double parked car or waiting for traffic to clear — we can start to chart a course to faster, more reliable buses, buses that passengers opt for because they get where they need to go faster than walking or in a car.
In May, the Transit Costs Project released what we call the Transit Priority Atlas; it contains three primary elements. First, we collected quantitative data from 32 cities to compare and contrast their bus operations along a wide range of indicators. Second, we documented different priority strategies used to speed up the bus. Third, we reviewed historical case studies to show how change has been achieved.
What we found is that improving surface transit operations is slow and politically perilous. There are no simple fixes. It requires an ongoing commitment to nuts-and-bolts traffic management to yield meaningful results that deliver faster travel times for people and greater service reliability.
After collecting data from 32 cities from around the world, we discovered that while it’s true that surface street traffic waxes and wanes over the course of the day, bus and trolley operations don’t have to suffer equally. Cities like Zurich, Bologna and Munich have found ways to prioritize surface transit so that travel speeds remain consistent throughout the day even as automobile speeds vary.
We collected these ideas in a transit priority toolbox with real-world examples and stylized drawings to make these interventions more tangible and vivid to practitioners, elected officials, journalists and anyone interested in how to improve transit.
For example, painted bus lanes have become more commonplace in North America as mayors pay lip service to improving transit. These easy-to-deploy curb-adjacent and parking-adjacent bus lanes, however, haven’t been paired with other changes to convey substantive priority by addressing conflicts with other vehicles that delay buses, notably at intersections. The Atlas illustrates how an extensive set of tools can be combined into broader priority strategies that rearrange the hierarchy of streets and shape circulation patterns, for example, by diverting through traffic away from transit routes or by establishing priority corridors for transit. Dead-ending lateral streets or turning them into right-in/right-out are two examples of interventions that reorder the hierarchy of streets to favor transit. Instead of maintaining equal access to each street, these treatments prioritize the transit street over the non-transit street. Another successful strategy is to plan transit priority following a “complete network” rather than a “complete street” paradigm, especially in parts of cities built before the car, with dense road networks and relatively narrow streets. By diverting through traffic away from transit corridors using tools such as modal filters and transit-only streets, bus routes can be protected from congestion even when there isn’t sufficient space to give them their own lane.
These localized interventions, when embedded in broader traffic management strategies that favor transit by systematically addressing the sources of delays, have delivered faster, more reliable, and cheaper-to-operate trams and buses in cities like Zürich, Munich, Prague, Lyon, Stockholm and many more examples detailed in the Atlas.
Finally, through an in-depth case study, we documented how a forward-looking political vision for better transit and a less car-centric city shaped traffic management policies in Bologna over a four-decade period. In the 1970s as mass automobility overwhelmed Italian cities, Bologna decided to prevent automobile traffic from “suffocating” the city. It didn’t have the resources to introduce high-capacity transit, such as a subway, or build more road infrastructure to alleviate traffic. Instead, it turned to street network management. Through incremental changes at the city-wide scale, such as limited traffic areas, one-way streets and transit priority via bus-only streets and contra-flow lanes, Bologna reduced conflicts between automobiles and buses. By freeing the bus from congestion and limiting access to private vehicles into the city center, scheduled bus travel speeds increased from around 14.5 km/h to 16 km/h. Despite the small numbers, bus travel speeds improved by more than 10%. A faster, more reliable bus has coincided with Bologna’s resurgence: a thriving city center and one of the highest transit modal shares and per capita usage in the country at around 300 per year, even as Italian car ownership rates have gone from 300 per 1000 residents in the 1970s to 650 per 1000 residents in the 2000s.
Bologna offers a lesson to cities that want to improve the bus but don’t have the money to take on capital construction: Smart management, namely creating a legible hierarchy of streets, minimizing conflicts and continually iterating on what works can tame congestion and revitalize public transit — and do it without straining the public fisc.
