A Bus-Based Progression System for Arterials with Heavy Transit Flows

Conventional Transit Signal Priority (TSP) controls often reach the limitation for arterials accommodating heavy bus flows since the priority function can significantly increase delay at minor streets. Under such conditions, a proper signal progression plan that accounts for the benefits of buses may offer the potential to improve the reliability of bus operations and increase the bus ridership. This study proposes a bus-based progression model to reduce the delay of buses on local arterials. Given the cycle length and green splits at each intersection, the bus-based progression model, grounded on the same notion as conventional signal progression methods, considers the operational characteristics of transit vehicles, such as the impact of bus dwell time and the capacity constraints at bus stops. Also, to deal with the stochastic nature of dwell time, this study introduces additional constraints to maximize the percentage of buses which can stay within the green band after leaving bus stops. Taking an arterial with five intersections and three two-way bus stops as an example, this study applies VISSIM as an unbiased tool for model evaluation. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model can significantly reduce bus passenger delays and the average person delays for the entire arterial, compared with the conventional progression models.