California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems with dedicated lanes have shown advantages over traditional bus systems and have attracted more transit riders. However, it is not always possible to build BRT systems with two dedicated lanes due to physical and cost constraints. A BRT system with a single dedicated lane is more practical and desirable in such situations. In a single lane configuration, buses approaching from opposite directions share the same road section and can overtake or pass each other only at the bus stops. We propose an optimization model to describe the synchronization requirements of the BRT buses with the objective to minimize the total travel and dwell time. The computational results show that a BRT system with a single dedicated lane yields similar total travel time to a BRT system with double dedicated lanes when the headway is not very short (e.g., more than 20 minutes). In addition, in order to manage the possible delay at intersections, a simple speed control algorithm is implemented to adjust the bus speed in real-time if the bus is delayed considerably. A microscopic simulation based on the simulation tool VISSIM is conducted to examine the impact of the BRT bus on other traffic and the performance of the speed control. The simulation result shows that the speed control effectively handles the delay at the intersection and that other traffic is rarely impacted by the speed control.