Transit Priority Strategies for Multiple Routes under Headway-Based Operations

Abstract

This paper presents a transit signal priority (TSP) model designed to consider the benefits both to bus riders and to intersection passenger car users. The proposed strategy, which is mainly for headway-based bus operations, offers the responsible agency a reliable way to determine the optimal green extension or red truncation duration in response to multiple bus priority requests from different routes. The control objective is to minimize bus passenger waiting time at the downstream bus stop while ensuring that the delays for all passengers are not increased. In tests that used field data from Jinan, China, the proposed strategy showed promise in reducing bus passenger waiting time and total intersection delay. Further exploration with simulation experiments for sensitivity analysis found that TSP is most effective if the ratio between bus and passenger volumes exceeds a threshold of 2%.