NECTAR CONFERENCE Las Palmas G . C June 2 - 4 , 2005 WHEN IS A BUS NOT A BUS ? REDEFINING TRANSPORT TYPOLOGY

Recent system advances in the rapid transit sector have led to a position where the various modes are trying to look and feel like a mode which they are not buses acting like trams, trams pretending to be metro or even heavy rail (tram-train). There are issues associated with this blurring of boundaries that makes the definition within the existing typology redundant. Added to this there is a proliferation of new and rather confused acronyms LRT can be light rapid or rail transit and some terms, BRT (bus rapid transit), ULR (ultra-light rail), exist without apparent clarity of definition. There are potential implications for this indistinct situation for system promoters the U.K. Safety Regulatory framework draws no distinction between forms of guided transit; hence any form of guided bus falls under the same onerous regulatory safety requirements for a rail-based system. The Health & Safety Executive is to revoke the existing safety framework and implement one based upon European directives allowing for system differentiation. The directive would be better placed to discriminate relative safety requirements provided there is a classification of the various modes. The deregulation of bus services introduced competitive-access implications why invest in a capital-laden infrastructure with the threat that this could be operated upon by competitors? This would suit the new forms of guided-bus being distinguished from regular bus operations. The U.K. suffers from bus-apathy, based on the perception that the bus is a low-quality solution, and this situation is not helped by the use of regular buses on kerb-guided systems being classified as equivalent in definition as a magnetically or optically guided-bus or even the French tram-tyre solution. The forms of transit are re-defined in the existing typology to address transit modes that constitute heavy rail, metro, light rail and the various forms of busbased transit. A simplistic decision-tree is used to classify the transit modes to demonstrate the typology in real-world application in an attempt to re-focus each type of emerging transit artefact.