Research on the necessity of bus lane policy: Assessing the impacts of bus lane policy on urban traffic with microscopic simulation methods:Assessing the impacts of bus lane policy on urban traffic with microscopic simulation methods
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Last Updated: 10-2020
The impact of public transport priority measures, especially the dedicated bus lane, on urban traffic is an increasing topic of interest. This paper contributed to discuss the necessity of the dedicated bus lane on an urban arterial. In order to comprehensively evaluate the current bus lane policy, three different perspectives, namely traffic flow, vehicle emission, and air quality, were identified. Correspondingly, three microscopic simulators (SUMO, VERSIT+, and GRAL) were chosen. Based on the reliable data flow and efficient data preparation, an integrated modelling framework was introduced which can generate various measurement indices such as traffic volume comparison, bus deviation time, street vehicle emissions, and pollutant concentration distributions. Afterwards, an urban road in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, that includes the dedicated bus lane was selected to set up the baseline scenario. Bus trips and car trips were simulated from 06:30 to 19:00 on a typical weekday, as well as the corresponding vehicle emissions and air quality. Furthermore, by changing the accessibility of the bus lane to private vehicles and setting up the adaptive traffic lights, in total five possible bus lane policy alternatives were created and analyzed. By comparing the performance from different perspectives under each scenario, a significant improvement regarding the traffic performance and matching vehicle emissions and air quality in the modelling domain was found when the bus lane was set as a dynamic bus lane and the adaptive traffic light system was employed.