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Metrobus (BRT) Bus Shelter System
Metrobus Av. 9 de Julio
To address the city from use supports can be done from a generic or a specific approach.
Buenos Aires is a large inhabitable container: its extent and scale live side by side with a moisaic of neighborhoods, each of them endowed with a strong identity.
This duality takes on different forms of inhabiting the city, from the more generic form related to active supports like urban mobility and connectivity to the more particular form that leads to interpreting the geographical and social fabric of its neighborhoods through more passive supports. Thus, the response to this qualified uses-based fabric goes from the micro-architectures of the great linear road systems such as the Metrobus bus stops to a more cellular system like the bus shelters and urban signage including the recreational or leisure instances, in parks or city squares.
By traversing the city from one end to the other, the Metrobus transport system requires to be considered from a dimensional, graphic and lighting point of view.
Amber roofs, rubbing strips and panels that are transilluminated at night, vertical and horizontal enclosures with identity skins as well as horizontal boundaries with color linear signage contribute to sew the city far and wide. Also, these elements are featured in perceptible dimensional units at pedestrian eye level in a “one on one” contact.
The bus sheters communicate, they are experienced and seen from afar, in the intermediate distance and at close range.
To make this “city scale” possible the design concept must go from the part to the whole of the stop, and from here to the urban scale through the industrial design and manufacturing concept of architectural elements.
The construction works of the Buenos Aires Metrobus (BRT) takes place in an already existing city which has to be intervened with an efficient mobility system.
In this case the “Metrobus” image is clad in green with screen-printed glass creating a leaf print paired with the brownish structural component of the steel porticos, thereby creating an artificial central lower scale that is embraced by the lush trees at the sides.
The stop has a double front opening and a central roofed space for passenger circulation paralell to the avenue which is put to good use by all pedestrians.
There are various bus stop typologies or functional units which are accessed via an elevated pedestrian ramp for platform-level boarding.
All along the system –including access points and platforms- the floor pavements is equipped with Tactile Ground Surface Indicators for people with vision impairments, and passengers in general, bearing different messages for passengers standing on the platform edge, those queueing up or circulating. Along these lines, Braille readers have been installed in the columns near the access points.
The Metrobus (BRT) bus shelter project far from being isolated is part of the Urban Furniture and Equipment system covering the entire City of Buenos Aires. The public tender was won by the same designers.
The Metrobus 9 de Julio obtained the “Sustainable Transport ITDP 1st AWARD 2014 granted to the city of Buenos Aires by The Institute of Transport and Development Policy, New York, USA.
