Improving Bus Transit in Cities with Appropriate Dynamic Lane Allocating Strategies

Abstract This paper describes how dynamic lane allocation strategies may improve bus transit. The considered strategies are bus lanes with intermittent priorities (BLIPs). These strategies consist in intermittently opening the bus lane to general traffic when not in use by a bus. Even if benefits of such strategies have been pointed out in the literature, the activation process has received little attention. Chiabaut et al. (2012) has firstly proposed an analytical approach for BLIPs activation. However, the analytical (extended) kinematic wave model uses a rough description of lane-changing maneuvers. This paper tries to overcome this limitation through a refined approach using the simulation package SymuVia. The simulated results show a good agreement with analytical results. For comparable case, simulation enables more sophisticated case to be investigated. A sensitivity analysis is carried out to identify the parameters that have the most influence on BLIPs activation efficiency.

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