Arterial Transit Priority Research Based On Sensitivity Analysis

Recently, with the rapid economic development and the challenge of urbanization, automobile explosion is spreading in China. On the contrary, the speed of construction of urban road is much slower than the speed of the climb of numbers of vehicle. Moreover, the management level is also lagging. As a result, the problem of traffic jam in the city becomes more serious, which can influence the people’s travel by increasing delay and reducing speed. Moreover, traffic safety and environment pollution are two other challenges that confront us. Since the road takes a rather long cycle to build, improve the level of traffic management and develop public transportation are wise decisions to solve the above problems. Urban road traffic intersections in the city integrated road transport system play an extremely important role. So, the adjustments of signal timing have an effect the entire traffic network system. Signal control can achieve public priority which cut down delay of public transportation as well as improve service levels. Additionally, arterial coordinated control is considered as the key measure to alleviate traffic congestion and improve traffic efficiency. In previous studies, interests of public transportation are overstressed, which ignore the effect in traffic flow brought by public transport priority. As a result, the following studies have been done.Firstly, the basic theory of arterial road coordinate control and Transit Signal Priority (TSP) are discussed, which include green phase extension and red phase reduction. Next, a sensitivity analysis in VISSIM of green time impact on operation of the arterial traffic flow is conducted. The result is summarized as a table that shows the optimal green time. Moreover, the change of delay, numbers of stop and queue length are observed caused by the change of traffic flow and the scale of public transport. Additionally, the trigger conditions include the traffic volume and the scales of public transport are proposed. According to the sensitivity analysis, the traditional TSP strategy is refined and improved which balance the interests of social vehicle and public transport. Because of the improvements are based on the simulation in VISSIM, it would optimize the traffic Performance Index (PI) and enhance the traffic efficiency further.