Background Info

Lund is a university town with ca. 105,000 citizens in southern Sweden Bus Rapid Transit is a traffic management system first developed in Curitiba in Brazil. The most significant feature is reserving a traffic lane for busses only. Traffic congestion is a major problem around the world, with environmental and other negative impacts

If you say that the south-swedish university town Lund has a problem with traffic congestion, most global citizens will probably take it as a joke. Compared to more representative juman dwellings like Sao Paolo, Calcutta, Sofia or New York, one could hardly say that traffic even exists here. But Lund is a municipality that loves to do everything right - it is a Fairtrade city and was recently named Sweden's third best city in environmental work . Now it is introducing its own brand of a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, a system that has been blogged about on both the Think 2 and the Think 3 platforms, and promises to improve environment and mobility in urban centers.

The idea, more specifically is to reserve one line for busses going in one direction, whereas busses in the meeting direction will drive together with the cars. The reserved bus will be used to serve commuting - into town in the morning, and out of town in the afternoon.

I asked the municiapality if the inspriation to this comes from the BRT system. The asnwer was that they had looked at transport systems all over the world to find a system that fit Lund. Obviously there is a lot of creative thinking going on about public transport systems, not only in the developing world, but it is noteworthy that a Brazilian city - Curitiba, was the first one to try out this system.

Luan Galani's Think3 blog post about the Brazilian city Curitiba notes that

'smart cities tend to be smaller, compact and more efficient'. And this seems not to be a one-off new idea. As the North-American journalist wrote, between the 14th and 18th centuries, modest-sized cities like Venice and Antwerp not only created vibrant urban quarters but nurtured modern capitalism. What comes to reinforce the disputable proverb that good things come in small packages

Lund is in deed a small package of a town, and a very fortunate such. There is a university, and not much else. All the goods and bads of urban life are outsourced to the nearby cities Malmö and Copenhagen. Whereas Lund is regarded as one of Sweden's safest places in Scandinavia, Copenhagen and Malmö have well known problems with ethnic tensions and organized crime. But is the to one of these cities you have to go for a decent concert, or if you are interested in any kind of entertainment that does not involved dead drunk students. I think it is also a gift for policy makers to have such a highly educated population. The BBC have made a reportage from Lund, naming it the The city where bicycles dominate. The citizens of Lund are very receptive to scientific arguments - you only need to convince them that biking is good, and they will do it. And of course - in a city like this there are no distances, which makes biking comfortable and fast.

But the specific location also generates some challenges. Lund is surrounded by smaller, picturesque villages that serve as suburbs. The BBC in the link above claims that 60% of Lund's citizens commute by bike, but I don't think they have included the citizens living outside Lund, commuting to the town centre.

As this is also one of Sweden's major agricultural areas, at harvest time these suburbian commuters must share the roads with all kinds of tractors and agricultural machinery, which can slow down the movement in and out of Lund. It is on one of the entrance roads, that suffer from exactly this problem, that the municipality will now build a dedicated line for busses - making it more attractive for commuters to take the bus in stead of the car.

Should we praise Lund for doing the right thing, or remark on how easy it was to achieve? I think the story here is not that a small Swedish town plans its traffic better, but that they do it with an idea that origins from the developing world. The first city with a BRT system was Curitibia, and since then more than 80 cities have followed suit globally, especially in the developing world.

Too often we think of the developing world as a place with immense problems, problems that should be solved with ideas from the developed world. Even the words we use - developing and developed - imply this. But in reality, the best solutions will come from where the problems are. Not a small number of students in this town occupy themselves with solutions to problems in Africa, Asia and South America. But it is a Brazilian idea that helps Lund solve its miniscule congestion problems.