Abstract: To contend with the negative impacts of intersection-based transit system priority (TSP) control on side-street traffic and also to enhance its effectiveness from the entire arterial’s perspective, this study presents an integrated arterial-based TSP system to promote the bus operations. The proposed system employs an off-line transit-based progression system to produce the base signal plan, which is embedded with a feature to minimize the negative impacts of local TSP implementation on non-priority movements at critical intersections. With its specially designed evaluation function, the proposed system is capable of minimizing ineffective activations of local TSP which often results in undesirable arriving patterns to its downstream intersection and excessive delays of all vehicles. Extensive evaluation with simulation experiments confirms that the proposed system, integrating local TSP with transit-based signal progression systems, can indeed circumvent the deficiencies of conventional TSP and produce the expected benefits to both passenger cars and transit vehicles over the entire arterial.
Presented at TRB’s 97th Annual Meeting, January 7-11, 2018, in Washington, D.C.
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