A Microsimulation Study of Bus Priority with Pre-Signaling

The provision of transit priority has been shown to improve the performance of public transport, which is a more efficient consumer of energy and space than private transport. On the other hand, the implementation of transit priority may also have disadvantages and penalize the general traffic. Thus, the design of the transit priority needs to balance these two opposing effects. This research aims to implement a bus priority system that utilizes a dedicated bus lane terminated upstream of the intersection, along with an additional signal, known as a pre-signal, at this location. A wide literature exists with studies of adaptive control pre-signals that are primarily focused on isolated intersections and concern simple traffic schemes. The current study investigates the performances of pre-signals in more realistic contexts through microsimulation and focuses specifically on two issues: the position of the pre-signal with respect to the main signal and the application domain of pre-signal strategies compared to the standard layouts of bus lanes, either continuous or interrupted.