Paper Details

TRB 91st Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Event Number:	489
Event Title:	Design and Assessment of Traffic Signal Priority for Transit
Event Date:	Jan 24 2012 8:30AM- 10:15AM
Event Location:	Marriott, Salon 2
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Design of Light-Rail Transit Signal Priority to Improve Arterial Traffic Mobility (12-0631)

Transit Signal Priority (TSP) is a cost effective strategy for improving the movement of transit vehicles, such as Light Rail Transit (LRT), buses or streetcars, through controlled intersections. Application of TSP strategies improves the reliability and quality of services of transit vehicles, while causes less disruption to normal traffic. City of Edmonton in Canada has recently extended the LRT system, most of the part of which run through at grade intersections. LRT is currently operating under preemption which is causing significant delay to other traffic. The problem is more pronounced during peak hours when the frequency of LRT is increased to 5 minutes. This has led to dissatisfaction among the motorists along the corridor. In this paper, we have analyzed different TSP strategies for improving the performance of the LRT corridor. VISSIM, a micro-simulation tool with its Ring Barrier Controller (RBC) emulator is used to implement the strategies at a major intersection during peak hours. Field data for both AM and PM peak hours were collected at four intersections along the corridor for the calibration of the VISSIM model. The three TSP strategies explored in this paper are (a) LRT preemption (b) LRT prediction, and (c) LRT prediction together with transit bus priority. Each strategy is evaluated in terms of a number of measures of performances. It is found from the results that the strategy (b), where LRT arrival time is predicted to provide LRT preemption, yields the highest improvement in the corridor performance.

Authors
     Islam, Md. Tazul , University of Alberta, Canada
     Tiwana, Jatinder , University of Alberta, Canada
     Qiu, Tony Z. , University of Alberta, Canada