TRANSIT SIGNAL PRIORITY EVALUATION

The Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (Tri- Met) has entered into an agreement with the City of Portland, Oregon to enable its transit buses to use the low transit priority request of the signals within the city's jurisdiction. The three primary goals for the use of transit priority are: 1) to increase throughput within specified traffic corridors; 2) to reduce transit running times; and 3) to improve transit schedule reliability. This paper will focus on methods Tri-Met will employ to evaluate the effectiveness of its transit signal priority effort on transit operations, and to determine if its goals have been met. The project was scheduled to commence in February 2001 and preliminary evaluation results are expected by June 2001