Aiming at providing effective priority control for transit as well as minimizing the adverse impacts on passenger car movements along the arterial, this paper presents an effective coordinated transit priority control optimization model which has the following features: (1) the control unit is defined as the coordinated intersection group between two successive bus stops; (2) buses are detected after leaving the upstream stop before their arrival at the first intersection of a control unit; (3) the dynamic interactions of priority strategies between adjacent intersections within a control unit are modeled using a bus delay model and an ineffective priority time model; (4) a linear program model is developed to generate the optimal priority strategies to reduce the bus travel time in case of priority is necessary and ensure every priority treatments implemented at each intersection is effective. Extensive experimental analyses, including time-space diagram based deterministic analysis and simulation based analysis were performed, and results were compared with the conventional transit signal priority strategy and no priority scenario. The proposed model presents promising outcomes in design of transit priority control signals in terms of decreasing bus delay, improving bus schedule adherence, and minimizing negative impacts on general traffic under different traffic demand patterns.
↧