Transit Ways

Transit Ways are commonly deployed in suburban or peri-urban contexts and along linear corridors with no property frontage and minimal interference from intersecting infrastructure. They can be found across most continents and became popular in the 1970s and 1980s in parts of Europe, Oceania, and North America as a way to provide fast, non-railway bus transit in rapidly sprawling cities on a budget, similar to dedicated freeway-median lanes (B2) from the same era. Pittsburgh’s South (1977) and East (1983) Busways, Almere’s first busbaan (1980), Ottawa’s Transitways (1983), and Adelaide’s O-bahn (1986) are among the early examples of purpose-built bus-only roads spanning long stretches [1,2,3,4,5]. More recent examples include the Los Angeles Orange Line BRT (2005), which reuses a former interurban railway right-of-way and Amsterdam’s Zuidtangent (2002). Bus-only roads have also been used more selectively over short distances, to provide transit shortcuts in areas with fragmented suburban road patterns, notably in Sweden and the Netherlands. Transit Ways are very effective for rapid bus transit, especially grade-separated ones, but they require consistent upfront investment to acquire the right-of-way and build grade separations, or a high level of forward-looking urban planning to preserve alignment in greenfield developments.