Dreaming BRTS!

Vasanth, I can see what you are trying to say about the doors and it will work provided the BRT corridors are long enough to cross the length and breadth of the city - in this way you really have a proper train on wheels (the best BRT systems are exactly that) and you can have doors where ever you want and design platforms what ever way you want.

A'bad and Delhi do have wide roads - in fact A'bad BRTs 2 of 3 corridors are 40 and 60 meters wide and lengths are pretty long.

Now take the situation in Pune - After a handful of kilometers the roads narrow down. The BRT corridors average 6-8km and are disjointed. It makes very little sense to travel on such a BRT where one needs a feeder bus to get to it, then change to another at city center, then again for another set of BRT and perhaps last leg connecting feeder - interchanges on London tube take average 10 minutes (sometimes more). Thus in Pune we need buses that can also ply on normal non-BRT roads to reduce number of interchanges. Hence at least in Pune, the buses have to be conventional.

The point about adopting the principles of BRT and then tweaking them is very important - no one can dream of Bogota style BRT in old cities like Paris and London. This video shows Paris version of BRT http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/mobilien/ - note that they have not restricted themselves to this strange concept we in India have got stuck with i.e. for bus priority we need 100 feet wide roads. You will see from the video that in Paris they have kerbside / median / with flow / contraflow - everything htrown in on roads that are no wider than average roads in our cities like Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore.

Mobilien like London does not focus on speed - bus priority is more important for ensuring reliability. In Mumbai when I used BEST, I could work out in few days what bus frequencies were and what time to expect a certain bus (despite all that traffic) and I could leave for work at a scheduled time (I did not worry what if my bus comes early and goes off or what if my bus comes 15 minutes late). Reliability is the key, London bus lanes sometimes are very short (some not even 205 meters long), each such small stretch saves few seconds of travel time but adds to reliability by 60-80%.

ASJ

PS: Latin America drives on right of road anyway and their doors will be on right as a convention. There is another concept of contraflow BRT / median lanes as well but I won't talk about now to avoid confusion.