BUS PRIORITY SYSTEM STUDIES.

To facilitate the evaluation of bus priority operations, a new automated technique for data recording and analysis has been developed and applied to a demonstration project in Miami, Florida, in which two schemes are evaluated. The first involves preemption of 35 traffic signals along an arterial route. In the second, an exclusive bus lane was added to the system, with signal preemption features retained. The measures of effectiveness used to evaluate the two bus priority techniques include speed, delay, travel time, fuel consumption, and comfort measure such as speed noise, number of stops, and speed changes. It was found that both priority techniques resulted in significant improvement in all of the measures of effectiveness. The relationships between the measures of effectiveness were also explored.