Novel Design Method for Bus Approach Lanes with Bus Guidance and Priority Controls for Prioritizing Through and Left-Turn Buses

Abstract

Transit priority is a useful way of improving transit operations in urban networks. However, the through and left-turn buses are rarely prioritized simultaneously at isolated intersections in the existing studies. This paper presents a variable bus approach lane design with a bus guidance and priority control model, which can reduce the delay of both the through and left-turn buses. The variable bus approach lanes can be dynamically used for the through and left-turn buses during the various periods of a signal cycle by the integrated design of geometric layouts and signal timing. A detailed bus guidance and priority control optimization model is formulated to guide the buses entering the appropriate bus approach lanes, and it provides optimal signal priorities for buses. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by a case study and numerical experiments. The results show that, on average, the total passenger delay can be reduced by 5% for every 30 veh/h and 40 veh/h increase in the volume of through buses and left-turn buses, respectively. Moreover, a comparison between the proposed method and the conventional transit priority method reveals that significant improvements can be made in reducing delays using the proposed method even at intersections with high degree of the saturation.