Through all our talks of transportation solutions in Atlanta, we often sneer at the lowly bus, and talk with the greatest enthusiasm about rail.  We envision an intricate web of hard steel, stretching across our metro-landscape, allowing cheerful residents to jump from trolley, to train, to trolley and back again.   There’s an undeniable nostalgia attached to the train and trolley, but is it the best and easiest solution for a city’s transportation problems of the 21st century?

On it’s front page this morning, the NY Times profiles the new, extensive bus service in Bogota, Columbia called the “TransMilenio” and deems it an undeniable success.  In response to fears of global warming, smog and congestion, the paper writes…

“Bus rapid transit systems like Bogotá’s, called TransMilenio, might hold an answer. Now used for an average of 1.6 million trips each day, TransMilenio has allowed the city to remove 7,000 small private buses from its roads, reducing the use of bus fuel — and associated emissions — by more than 59 percent since it opened its first line in 2001, according to city officials.”

Could such a system – which according to the Times article costs 30 times less than a subway to build and requires a third of the budget to operate – be the answer in the U.S.?  Despite the praise the given to Bogota, the Times reporter hedges his bets when it comes to native soil.

But bus rapid transit systems are not the answer for every city. In the United States, where cost is less constraining, some cities, like Los Angeles, have built B.R.T.’s, but they tend to lack many of the components of comprehensive systems like TransMilenio, like fully enclosed stations, and they serve as an addition to existing rail networks.

Huh?  So, buses aren’t the answer in cities where it’s not executed properly?  That doesn’t really exclude anyone, except those municipalities that suffer from genetic incompetence.  It sounds to me like if you really went whole-hog on a B.R.T., it could work anywhere.  That entails things detailed in the article like fully enclosed stations and dedicated bus lanes.   And to appease the aestetic crowd, we could buy cool, iconic buses.

I haven’t completely sold myself on the idea that this could be implemented anywhere successfully, but this article’s example gives me more reason than ever to doubt my own “train-skewed” vision.   In an era of record debt, maybe it’s time for the U.S. to swallow it’s collective pride and take a lesson from the second and third world.