The Effect of Bus Lane Management Techniques on Operator Experience, Safety, and On-Time Performance

In Los Angeles County, buses carry 70% of LA Metro customers. Traffic congestion greatly affects the efficiency and reliability of Metro’s bus system, which has resulted in a 12.5% drop in average speeds over the last 25 years. As a solution, transit agencies have begun implementing mixed-use bus lanes, or curbside bus lanes that operate in the same right of way as general traffic, and give buses the opportunity to bypass traffic, which can improve service reliability and travel speeds. In LA County, there are 27 miles of mixed-use bus lanes; however, these lanes are largely passively enforced through roadway striping and signage. As a result, most of the lanes in LA County have high vehicle intrusion rates. A particularly notorious location for vehicle intrusion is a mixed-use bus lane on Wilshire Boulevard, which was fully installed in 2015 and is not actively enforced by police or parking officials. A preliminary study of Wilshire Boulevard found that lane intrusions occur at a rate of one every four minutes during the bus lane operating hours. By comparison, LA Metro, in partnership with the LA Department of Transportation, piloted a bus lane in 2019 in Downtown Los Angeles on Flower Street that received dedicated police enforcement. The pilot was largely successful due to this enforcement; it sets a possible model for how bus lanes in Los Angeles could be managed in order to maximize potential time savings, increase operational efficiency, and reduce vehicle-to-vehicle conflicts. This project set out to compare these two bus lanes and suggest future steps LA Metro can take to ensure effective bus-lane enforcement