Many other cities will look to Dakar and Mexico City for inspiration as they aim to create high-quality, cost-efficient, and sustainable public transport. But inspiration alone is not enough. Advocates must overcome many challenges in their quest for better cities, such as the initial analysis of a BRT line’s potential impacts. This kind of “scoping” requires some technical expertise, but often, nobody is willing to fund a custom analysis. Without initial studies, building momentum for investment in BRT could be impossible. 

That’s where ITDP’s new BRT SCOPE (Simple Calculator of Project Effects) web tool comes in. Previously, an initial BRT analysis might have required an expert and taken days to complete. Now, anyone can get ridership, climate, and air quality predictions in about 20 minutes in a web browser. The BRT SCOPE includes features to make it easy to compare and share your results, and is also available in Spanish and Portuguese. The Excel version allows further customization if you need to get more hands-on with the analysis. Let’s see how the web tool works, step by step. 

First, provide the location of the future BRT. We’ve chosen Vientiane, Laos, a city constructing new BRT corridors.

With the SCOPE web tool’s Map feature, we can simply draw the future BRT line and stations on a map of the city of Vientiane. The BRT SCOPE then analyzes the future corridor and population density data to predict the number of people impacted by the BRT project. The tool allows users to upload a geospatial file or manually set the population statistics around the future BRT line.

Next, we will provide more details about future projects. The SCOPE tool automatically calculates the local population density within ~1 kilometer of the project, which is used to estimate the number of people who can access a BRT station on foot. ITDP and other researchers have found that higher People Near Transit values correspond to higher public transit ridership.  

With a few more details, we can also immediately see the future frequency on the BRT corridor — a headway of around 3 minutes! By adjusting these parameters, we can see the impacts on the future headway. Expert research and ITDP’s data analysis have shown that more frequent bus corridors can also attract more riders. 

Now, we can optionally customize some of the inputs. The BRT SCOPE tool uses regional defaults for data like the city’s current breakdown of transportation modes. Here, we’ve updated this default to more specific values from Vientiane.

In just a few minutes, we have the results. This Vientiane BRT corridor will have 8.6 million riders in 2050 (an average of 33 thousand per weekday). We expect that 28% of those riders left their cars or motorcycles home to take the BRT instead, leading to 44,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions avoided by 2030.

This massive climate impact, equivalent to the emissions of consuming over 100,000 barrels of oil, could be important for cities applying for climate-related grants to fund BRT. Reducing polluting vehicle trips is also expected to lower harmful PM2.5 emissions by 7.5 tonnes by 2030. That could improve the local air quality in Vientiane. With the BRT SCOPE web tool, there are countless ways to use these results. We can export a PDF report and even download a geospatial file of the planned BRT route.

We can save this scenario by making an account and trying a slightly different version to compare the results. We could even use the tool’s predictions of ridership and shifts to BRT from other modes with other data to get impacts on public health and the local economy. In many cities, BRT is a great idea that needs champions to bring it to fruition.