California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

We report Year 1 results from a two-year project to develop a computer simulation, evaluation and visualization "toolbox", SmartBRT, to describe and evaluate operational aspects of bus rapid transit (BRT) concepts in order to aid decision-making. In conceiving and developing SmartBRT, we have maintained two objectives: 1. To provide FTA, Caltrans and local decision-makers with a rigorous and defensible, yet intuitive BRT operation evaluation method along with a general purpose BRT simulator/communication tool; and 2. To provide example applications of SmartBRT to actual BRT concepts and to document these applications in a "cookbook" manner to allow the widest dissemination of the "toolbox" to the practitioner community. In order to accomplish these objectives, our "toolbox" provides "hooks" for stakeholders - compelling visualizations for local decision-makers, interfaces to conventional traffic modeling tools for the transportation engineering community (and others on the FTA team), interfaces to planning tools for transportation planners, powerful analytical tools for BRT concept developers and researchers, and short-term results for all the potential constituency above.