Beautiful sight: Green buses hit Karachi BRT in first experiment

Karachi Green Line BRT or Bus Rapid Transit corridor.

The buses arrived at the port and were sent to the Surjani depot. The Green line runs from Numaish to Surjani.

People going to work in the early morning saw the buses on the route. It was a sight to behold as Karachi has been hearing about the BRT for years and been hoping to get a mass transit system for even longer.

Prime Minister Imran Khan will inaugurate the service in two months. So there will be a wait.

The Green Line route is Surjani, New Karachi, KDA Chowrangi, Sakhi Hasan, North Nazimabad and Nazimabad and then Numaish.

Bus Rapid Transit is a special kind of mass transit system. Mass transit is public transport for large numbers of people or the “masses”. In cities around the world it has been exceptionally successful. The award-winning example is the Transmilenio in Colombia’s Bogota city. The other cities where it proved a gamechanger include China’s Guangzhou.

Bus rapid transit allows buses to rapidly move in a corridor dedicated to them. This strip or corridor is set aside for them in the middle of wide roads. This allows the stream of buses to move up and down without getting ensnared in regular traffic. The rest of the width of the road is used by regular traffic such as cars and motorcycles. But even they can move easily because buses are not stopping in the middle on their corridors. BRT is essentially the separation of different types of traffic so they move smoothly.