Rapid Bus Lane Capacity Study

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has become alternative for reducing the pressure caused by traffic jam in metropolises, because it has advantage of cost-effectiveness that this system can provide the high quality service for people's moving with lower cost. So, in the worldwide, most officer and transportation engineers in big cities commit themselves to the planning, designing, constructing, operating and maintaining of BRT. In this situation, the capacity of bus lane is studied in this paper to facilitate the spread and building of BRT in China.Firstly, the components of BRT is discussed simply in the aspect of running way, station, vehicle, fare collecting system, operation and service and the ITS technologies, which is as the basis of studying capacity of bus lane. Secondly, three kinds of capacities that are capacity of the section of central bus lane, bus lane in signalized intersection, and bus stop were researched respectively. The new or improved models of capacity were built through comparing and analyzing the past models of these facilities. At last, the new models were applied in the analysis and computation of capacity of Beijing Road Bus Lane in Kunming. At the basis of investigation to Beijing Road Bus Lane, the capacity was computed and the bottleneck location that defined the capacity was found. Furthermore, the measures to improve the capacity of Beijing Road Bus Lane were presented in this paper, which were reducing the cycle time of signal at crossing, speeding up the boarding and alighting per passenger and increasing the efficiency of loading areas of bus stop.The capacity of bus lane was researched systematically in this paper. Finally, the frameworks of computing capacity of bus lane were constructed. It is believed that the more deeply understanding of BRT was formed in this process.