Paper no. 7 in: "10 years with the FUT programme" Future Urban Transport

The City of Barcelona is in the process of revamping its bus service and implementing a new high-performance system tentatively called RetBus. The new system uses a hybrid network concept developed at the Centre for Future Urban Transport in Berkeley (CFUT). A team of Barcelona researchers affi liated with CFUT, and led by the centre’s Director, optimized the design. RetBus will cover the city with fast and frequent buses on 12 routes. To avoid the costs of Bus Rapid Transit-like infrastructure, the system will use soft methods proposed by the research team to separate itself from the traffi c stream and to speed up passenger boarding. Although RetBus is designed to provide an effi cient stand-alone mobility solution for the long-distance trips of able-bodied citizens, it will be coordinated with the existing suburban train, metro, light rail and conventional (short-distance) bus systems to serve all kinds of trips. RetBus service can be provided using only a small fraction of the buses currently in use, and, since it allows for conventional service to be streamlined, it can be provided without adding buses.