United States Department of Transportation
i
The application of traffic signal preemption systems for controlling bus headways
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1978-04-01
[PDF-1.60 MB]
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Edition:Project memorandum
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Abstract:This report investigates the application of selective traffic signal preemption
for controlling the headways of local service buses (buses with average time
headways of less than 10 minutes), The preemption is selective in that it is granted
to only "late" buses along a route, leading to a reduction in headway variance. The potential benefits of more evenly spaced bus headways include reduced passenger
waiting times, reduced incidence of bus over loadings and more efficient fleet operation. Past application of traffic signal preemption systems have concentrated on
reducing travel times for buses in Central Business District (CBD) grids and arterials.
However, these systems have not been widely accepted and implemented,
indicating that the amount of reduction in travel time has not resulted in a sufficient
increase in ridership to offset the system costs and impacts on other traffic.
The analysis and simulation results in this report indicated that selective
traffic s1gual preemption is a feasible method for controlling the headways of buses
on short headway routes. Furthermore, selective preemp-ifon yielded equal or better
transit system performance compared to unconditional preemption with less than half
as many preemptions and preempted cycle time. Future plans are discussed for expandinr,
the simulation model developed in this report and continuing the analysis.
The output of this work is expected to be a quantification of benefits as a function
of bus priority variables, traffic variables and route characteristics.
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