An Algorithm for Reducing Vehicles’ Stop Behind the Bus Pre-signals

Abstract

One of the current controversial issues is mitigating traffic congestion in big cities. Public vehicles play a vital role in solving this matter, so it has been taken into consideration to improve not only the public transit’s infrastructure but also its functionality. More specifically, it is aimed to encourage travellers to use public vehicles. In order to serve this purpose, public transit systems’ delay needs to be decreased by prioritising them. Nowadays, pre-signal, as a modern strategy for prioritising buses, has been proposed. Pre-signal is an additional signal that is applied near the intersection to give buses priority through stopping vehicles in advance of the main intersection, and it reduces the average delay per traveller. However, it has to be mentioned that pre-signals penalise private vehicles by extra stops. This paper aims to propose a model to improve the pre-signal strategy by reducing the vehicles’ number of stops behind the pre-signals. This model would cause vehicles to be able to adjust their speed based on traffic conditions and traffic signal as well as buses’ speed and approach.