Strategies for Transit Priority

In areas with transit service, providing priority to transit vehicles over other road users can increase a roadway’s person-capacity without widening the roadway, in addition to furthering the environmental benefits of public transportation and providing cost savings for transit agencies and users. Strategies for transit priority include exclusive lanes, transit signal priority, queue-jump lanes/signals, bus bulbs, and yield-to-bus (YTB) programs. City planners and traffic engineers should keep these treatments in mind when developing plans and projects for areas with transit service, but they may not be aware of all the options and when to consider using each. The literature, especially Bus and Rail Preferential Treatments in Mixed Traffic, covers the basics of transit priority strategies. However, there is little guidance on when to apply different preferential treatments for public transit, such as when to provide transit signal priority (TSP) versus a queue-jump lane and signal. As background, this paper provides an overview of various existing transit priority strategies, identifying conditions appropriate for the application of each strategy where such conditions are known and noting practical issues associated with implementation that are not necessarily published in the literature. Selected examples of applications in Virginia are given. In the future, planners and engineers could use these observations to develop guidance for choosing between different strategies for transit priority.