THE INTERMITTENT BUS LANE SIGNALS SETTING WITHIN AN AREA

This paper describes an application of the intermittent bus lane (IBL) technique. The IBL is a lane in which the status of a given section changes according to the presence of a bus in its spatial domain: when a bus is approaching such a section, the status of that lane is changed to a bus lane, and after the bus moves out of the section, it becomes a normal lane again, open to general traffic. Therefore when bus services are less frequent, general traffic will not suffer much, and bus priority can still be obtained. This measure can be operated at a single city block, but if all related control parameters along bus lines are considered together, more time gains can be obtained. In this paper, the basic structure and operation of IBL around a single intersection are briefly introduced, then the construction of an objective function and its relationships with the related priority control parameters along one bus line and their simplification are described. The calculations of the priority control parameters when there are several connected bus lines within an area are discussed. Results from a simulation suggest that joint consideration of IBL signals and traffic light signals at intersections leads to lower time losses in bus operation, but these gains can be significantly improved if there is an integrated control of several intersections along the bus lines, with larger advantages obtained for bus movements