Estimating Signalized Intersection Delays to Transit Vehicles

Many transit agencies have deployed automatic vehicle location (AVL) systems, automatic passenger counting (APC) systems, or both on a portion of their transit vehicle fleets. Data from these systems are used for realtime system monitoring and control, and archived data are often used for service performance reporting and for service planning. This paper proposes and demonstrates a method by which these archived data can be used to estimate the mean and variance of transit vehicle delays caused by signalized intersections. The proposed method is suitable for application to most transit AVL-APC databases and is demonstrated with data from Grand River Transit, the public transit service provider in the region of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The results obtained from the application to field data indicated that the proposed method was able to explain 96% of the variation in observed mean transit vehicle delay at signalized intersections. These results suggest that the proposed method has practical application for the identification and prioritization of candidate measures for transit priority, including transit signal priority (green extension, early green, special transit phases) and queue jump lanes.

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