This City of 220,000 People has 8 BRT Lines That Don’t Stop at Red Lights
How has Almere built such an impressive transit network?
Almere is a suburban municipality in the Netherlands, founded in 1984. Over the past 40 years, Almere has built its city around the bus, with a network of dedicated busways that go to every corner of the city. Almere has built such an impressive network for a city of its size because the city was built around high-quality buses. This approach is the complete opposite of what we typically do in Ontario, where we build new suburban developments without transit in mind.
Almere’s network radiates from the central station and downtown and travels to all corners of the city on dedicated busways that hardly interact with vehicles. Almere typically operates buses from 6 am to midnight every 15 minutes on all major routes. Frequencies can be as high as every 5 minutes on some routes during peak periods. These busways also have connections to the five other regional rail stations within the municipality.
In this article we’ll examine the M6 route. M6 is a route that travels from the north of the city to downtown Almere. M6 has seven stops and is roughly 4.6 kilometres long.
M6 operates on a busway which only interacts with vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians at very small local intersections. Small intersections have short traffic signal phases that can change quickly, and local streets have little traffic crossing the busway. This allows 100% transit signal priority when buses cross these intersections. M6 has one overpass and one underpass to cross arterial roads. Signal priority at small intersections, as well as grade separations at arterial roads, means that M6 hardly ever has to stop at red lights.
This video from @SightoftheNavigator on YouTube shows Almere’s transit signal priority in action.
The little interaction with vehicles is made possible by a smart traffic management plan. Vehicles travel to the outside of the neighbourhood on local streets to access arterial roads, while the busway goes straight through the middle of the neighbourhood. This eliminates interaction with busy arterial roads for M6 and reduces the number of grade separations that are needed.
Bus stops along the M6 are strategically placed to be in the heart of each neighbourhood. This allows M6 to serve residents in an efficient manner without unnecessarily close stop spacing, which would increase travel times. This image shows that most of the built-up area along M6 is within 400 metres of a stop, despite stop spacing being roughly around every 600 metres. Stops are also located on the far side of intersections for signal priority purposes. If stops were located on the near side of intersections, the traffic signal would not know when a bus finished boarding at a stop to give a green light, potentially causing unnecessary delays.
Due to the planning and infrastructure stated above. M6 is incredibly fast and reliable. All trips are scheduled to take 9-10 minutes throughout the week, and these buses stay on schedule as they don’t need to get stuck in traffic or at red lights. M6 has an average speed of around 30km/h, which is comparable to the average speeds of Toronto Subway Lines 1 and 2.
If you want to view a high-quality front-view ride of Almere’s buses, this video by @buschauffeurdenhaag on YouTube showcases the M2 route.
Despite offering a completely blank slate to build whatever infrastructure we please. Much of Ontario continues to build suburban sprawl that makes good transit difficult. However, this doesn’t have to be the case.
Since Almere’s busways are just regular two-lane-wide roads with a few grade separations, the upfront capital costs for municipalities to build this infrastructure wouldn’t be much different than typical road infrastructure seen in suburban sprawl. Additionally, this infrastructure likely would be cheaper to operate in the long run than excessively wide roads that are seen in typical suburban sprawl with poor transit. This is all without mentioning that transit-oriented communities that a good bus network supports are much cheaper to operate than car-oriented suburban infrastructure. It just makes sense to build new greenfield communities like this.
Almere shows us that with smart infrastructure and planning, we can have incredibly high-quality transit in new developments.
Written by Haadhi Faizal
This article was originally published on LinkedIn on December 3, 2024.