A STUDY ON THE INTRODUCTION OF BUS RAPID TRANSIT SYSTEM IN ASIAN DEVELOPING CITIES: A Case Study on Bangkok Metropolitan Administration Project

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has increasingly become an attractive urban transit alternative in many Asian developing cities due to its cost-effective and flexible implementation. However, it still seems to be difficult to introduce BRT to these cities because almost all of their city structures have been developed under solely a road transport development city plan and weakness of land use control gives rise to many problems, such as urban sprawl, traffic congestion, and air pollution. The purpose of this study was to introduce several strategies to support BRT implementation in Asian developing cities, such as a strategy to appropriately integrate the paratransit system into BRT system as being a feeder along a BRT corridor to supply demand. These proposed strategies were evaluated by applying demand forecasting and emission models to the BRT project plan of Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) in Thailand. It was demonstrated that the proposed strategies could effectively improve the BRT ridership, traffic conditions, and air pollution emission of the entire system in Bangkok. This study could be further extended to include strategy recommendation if a BRT system were to be introduced to other Asian developing cities.