Deployment of Unconventional Bus Lanes: Case Study

Bus rapid transit systems currently are being implemented in many cities around the world, especially in developing countries. However, providing priority to buses in these cities, where road infrastructure is already scarce, is problematic especially at the initial stages of the system when bus flows are low. For these low flows, dedicating a current car lane for bus use only can lead to underutilized lanes running through bottlenecks which could increase delay to general traffic (i.e. cars). In this case unconventional bus lanes can be used to eliminate bus delays while minimizing additional delays imparted to cars. The ideas entail deploying bus lanes intermittently (temporally and/or spatially) in the vicinity of bottlenecks; and to have these augment the traditional (i.e. static) bus lanes elsewhere throughout the network. A case study of unconventional bus lanes were done in Amman, Jordan. This paper describes the case study site and shows the need of unconventional bus lanes at this location. The site specific implementation and operation of unconventional bus lanes is described in detail. The results of this case study show that implementing unconventional bus lanes can decrease average car delays as compared to traditional, static bus lanes. These average delay savings can be as high as 12 minutes per car. It is also shown that deterministic models can yield results similar to microscopic simulations even though they do not incorporate lane changing behaviors. Therefore when field experiments are not possible, deterministic models can be used to easily determine the benefits of unconventional bus lanes over static bus lanes at their site of implementation.