BRT or Metro?

Nowadays, more than 30 cities in China already built BRT or building BRT right now. Meanwhile, 35 cities already built more than 1 line of the metro. We can easily tell that Metro has a lot of advantages that BRT can’t compare. Such as metro can transport more people; The speed of metro is faster than BRT; Metro is mostly on time. With these advantages, it is not difficult to tell that why BRT in Beijing and Shanghai is just a support transportation. For me, I lived in Beijing and Shanghai for some days. If I need to choose a kind of transportation to go somewhere, I will definitely choose metro. But I have ever been to Xiamen for a trip. In that city, there are more BRT lines for the citizens. I felt it is very convenience to take BRT to transport in the city. In my opinion, the scale of Xiamen is much smaller than Beijing and Shanghai which I think is the most important reason make BRT better than metro. As we can see, in the small city, to build BRT is cheaper than metro. Also, BRT is more flexible and easy to plan. Another advantage is that even with the development of the city, the need of the metro is bigger than BRT, it is easy to remove BRT station.

In general, the metro is the only effective choice for high-density, high-volume cities with high traffic demand. But for most medium-density and medium-sized cities in China, BRT may be a better choice because of its cost advantage.