Construction of the BRT in Braga begins in the first half of 2025

The construction of the BRT system (‘Bus Rapid Transit’, also known as metrobus) in the city of Braga will start at the beginning of the first half of 2025, the municipality announced today.

In a statement, the municipality states that the inclusion of the project in the latest review of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) made it possible to allocate 100 million euros to Braga’s BRT, an amount that corresponds to 66.6% of the project’s budget.

That amount will finance the construction of two of the four BRT lines, covering a length of 12.2 kilometers.

One of the lines will connect the Minho Center to the Railway Station and the other to the University of Minho and the hospital.

Subsequently, the project is expected to expand to two other lines, with a total length of 22.5 kilometers.

The total investment amounts to 150 million euros.

According to the Mayor of Braga, Ricardo Rio, the municipality is “strongly committed” to the transition of urban mobility, in order to ensure environmental sustainability in the municipality and contribute to this objective at a national level.

“The BRT system, due to its modernity, reliability, frequency and speed of circulation, will guarantee greater attractiveness, especially in the urban network, where it serves the majority of the population”, he said.

The project has already gone through several stages, such as the Preliminary Decision Support Study (in April 2021), the collection of data from the mobile network (February 2022), the demand study for the Implementation of the BRT (November 2022), traffic counting at 49 intersections (December 2022) and the urban insertion study (between 2023 and 2024).

As next steps, Ricardo Rio said that the competition for the preliminary study will now be launched, which will be followed by the design and implementation project, which will last approximately six months, with construction starting afterwards.

For Ricardo Rio, the BRT “is the most economical, attractive and quick-to-implement solution” and has a “strong component of urban regeneration, since Braga was designed with true urban highways”, with traffic from neighboring municipalities that cross the city .

“One of the great challenges of implementing the BRT is the humanization of these spaces, that is, we will use this project to slow down traffic, create circulation conditions for pedestrians and smooth modes of mobility, eliminate tunnel and viaduct crossings and create zones safer and more accessible crossing paths”, he also said.