Abstract

Adelaide, South Australia is a city with a long tradition of state of the art planning of its urban development and transport systems. As a planned ‘new world’ city it has largely escaped many of the traffic and environmental problems that beset other cities. An ongoing feature of its transport planning has been a readiness to adopt, adapt and attempt innovative solutions that are arguably ‘world’s firsts’. This chapter describes two such solutions from the last quarter of the twentieth century: a guided busway and a fully reversible one-way road. Further developments using Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) technologies to meet community goals for improved public transport operations are also described. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

The number of private vehicles increased dramatically during the last two decades in the island of Cyprus. This phenomenon had a negative effect on the bus transport mode which over the years its use has been considerably reduced. As traffic congestion increased considerably during the same period the need for a high quality public transportation system became clear. This need is also supported by the demand for public transportation by the aging and disadvantaged population. The best way to attract people back to public transportation is to have a reliable bus system with a high quality of service which can compensate for the lack of freedom and exibility a private vehicle can provide. However such a system should not have a negative effect on the traffic network in terms of congestion and travel times but should coexist serving both the needs of people who do not drive and those who use the public transport mode. The purpose of this paper is to present the development and evaluation of a number of scenarios aiming at attracting commuters back to public transportation. This idea stems from the fact that surveys among the Cypriot commuters show that people will use buses if buses provide a fast and reliable service. For this purpose, microscopic simulation models are developed in order to examine several scenarios of dedicated bus lanes and bus priority schemes so that the buses can provide the desired level of service with the minimal impact on the rest of the traffic. © 2009 IFAC. 434 441 "p"Sponsors: IFAC Technical Committee on Transportation Systems TC 7.4 Conference code: 85831 Cited By :3

Abstract

Under many circumstances, when providing full bus priority methods, urban transport officials have to operate buses in mixed traffic based on their road network limitations. In the case of Istanbul's Metrobus lane, for instance, when the route comes to the pre-designed Bosphorus Bridge, it has no choice but to merge with highway mixed traffic until it gets to the other side. Much has been written on the relative success of implementing Ramp Metering (RM), for example ALINEA (&lsquo Asservissement line´ aire d&rsquo entre´ e autoroutie&rsquo ) and Variable Speed Limits (VSL), two of the most widely-used &ldquo merging congestion&rdquo management strategies, in both a separate and combined manner. However, there has been no detailed study regarding the combination of these systems in the face of high bus volume. This being the case, the ultimate goal of this study is to bridge this gap by developing and proposing a combination of VSL and RM strategies in the presence of high bus volume (VSL+ALINEA/B). The proposed model has been coded using microscopic simulation software&mdash VISSIM&mdash and its vehicle actuated programming (VAP) feature referred to as VisVAP. For current traffic conditions, the proposed model is able to improve total travel time by 9.0%, lower the number of average delays of mixed traffic and buses by 29.1% and 81.5% respectively, increase average speed by 12.7%, boost bottleneck throughout by 2.8%, and lower fuel consumption, Carbon Monoxide (CO), Nitrogen Oxides (NOx), and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) emissions by 17.3% compared to the existing &ldquo VSL+ALINEA&rdquo model. The results of the scenario analysis confirmed that the proposed model is not only able to decrease delay times on the Metrobus system but is also able to improve the adverse effects of high bus volume when subject to adjacent mixed traffic flow along highway sections. Document type: Article