What If You Build It and They Don't Come? How the Ghost of Transit Past Haunts Transit Present

In the last quarter-century, both Bogota and Jakarta built bus rapid transit systems. Bogota’s is widely credited as a success; Jakarta’s not. To understand why, we look back more than a century to the roots of initial transit investments in these two cities. We credit Bogota’s current success in large part to pre-existing land use patterns – commercial streets, residential density, and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure – determined by its streetcar system of the 1910s that remain hospitable to successful transit today. Similarly, we suggest that Jakarta’s struggles stem from the difficulty of adapting areas built for private transport, particularly the car, to public transit. We conclude by using these insights to look forward and contemplate more generally whether and how transit can succeed in areas constructed during the period of auto hegemony and its pedestrian-unfriendly land uses