New Signal Priority Strategies to Improve Public Transit Operations in an Urban Corridor

Abstract

By facilitating public buses' movement through traffic signal-controlled intersections, a Transit Signal Priority (TSP) strategy can contribute to the reduction of queuing time at intersections. However, the traditional TSP has a negative impact on non-prioritized movements and other transport modes. This research proposes new TSP strategies that also seek to optimize other performance measure such as the person-delay at an isolated intersection and along a corridor. This research focused on major arterials as well as on minor arterial roads, whereas the majority of the existing studies addressed only the major arterial approach. As part of this research, the bus schedule was also taken into consideration. The proposed method is described in detail and is implemented on an arterial corridor in VISSIM. The study area simulation results indicated that the proposed TSP methods performed better than the conventional TSP.