New passive transit signal priority control strategy for the bus vehicles at urban arteries

A progression signal plan along multi-intersections is required for bus vehicles. However, for the traditional progression approach which concentrates on passenger cars, buses may not catch up the preset green band due to bus dwelling time at stops. For addressing this issue, a passive transit signal control strategy was developed. Firstly, the traditional multi-band control method was improved for arterial signal control by considering the initial queue and bus stops. And then, a multi-bus-band control approach was proposed for arterial signal control optimization based on the characteristics of bus operations. Finally, an integrated model consisting of multi-band and multi-bus-band was developed to trade off the benefits of passenger-car drivers and bus passengers. Taking the Jingshi Road in Jinan as an example, the micro-simulation software VISSIM was employed as an unbiased tool for model evaluation and comparisons. Simulation results reveal that the proposed bus-band control and integrated model can significantly reduce the stop frequency of buses and the average delay per person at the arterial, compared with the traditional multi-band model.