The BRT is “green”

Someone sent to me the idea of having electric buses to be used for the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system. Indeed, in this advent of getting and being “green”, that might be worth considering. However, it’s not as if that has not been suggested before. The BRT, ever since it had become popular in Curitiba and Bogota, was always looked up to as a system which actually addresses Climate Change and reduces carbon emissions. Yet, most of the BRTs in the world still run on the usual fuels ordinary vehicles use.

Maybe it’s the usual mistaken idea that electric vehicles are “greener” so to speak. We think of vehicles running on gasoline and diesel and imagine the exhaust smoke they emit and indeed we don’t consider them “green”. Because electricity is quite “invisible” in a way – we don’t see a combustion engine nor the smoke associated with it, we consider it “clean”, we forget that the source of electricity may still be diesel or bunker fuel at the power plant. In fact, electric vehicles may have more carbon emissions than fossil-fuel engines, depending on what fuel is used by our power plants.

BRTs and other mass transport systems are always considered “greener” than their ordinary traditional counterparts, mainly because of their efficiency in transporting people and goods. Once a system becomes very efficient, the power required for a passenger, or a “unit” of load, becomes much lower than traditional means and that counts for them becoming greener. After all, being green is actually measured in the decrease in emission of carbon to the atmosphere for any specific activity. Greener usually means a decrease in emission, not the total disappearance of it, which might not be possible.

While indeed, using “cleaner” fuels might produce less emissions, there are always some pluses and minuses that are being considered. And in the experience of those which already rolled out BRT’s worldwide, the majority of them still used the traditional fuel-based buses. There might be some electric BRTs somewhere, but I haven’t heard of a particular one, prompting me to believe it’s really a big deal for them to shift to electrical propulsion. BRTs have been promoted as an alternative that addresses climate change but due primarily to their efficiency of operations rather than the fuel they use.

Operationally, a lot of people don’t talk much about battery-operated buses and still vouch more for regular-fuel ones. While it may be an idea worth considering, I don’t think the present (or future) BRT management would consider this alternative. I haven’t heard any mention yet of this possibility so I would presume buses with regular propulsion would be fielded, that is, diesel ones. They would use cleaner fuel, of course. Anyway, the main principle of the BRT being a “green” system and a system that addresses climate change rests on its operations as a public transport system.

And if there is any doubt as to whether it is a “green” project or not, we only need to remember who initially funded its development in the first place --the Clean Technology Fund which is part of the Climate Investment Fund. You can’t get any “greener” than that.