Advancing Bus Priority: Interactive Report
How can we help buses stuck in traffic?
Northern Virginia is home to 7 bus agencies, 251 bus routes and more than half a million weekly bus riders. Identifying methods for advancing bus priority could save the region time and money.
Congestion Hurts Buses
Traffic congestion lengthens trips, decreases reliability and increases costs. The Washington DC region is particularly plagued by bad traffic congestion.
Buses get stuck in traffic just like cars. Since they carry more people, a bus stuck in traffic affects more people. Prioritizing buses on the road moves more people faster.
What does bus priority look like?
There are different methods of prioritizing bus and reducing time a bus rider is spent stuck in traffic. Bus priority treatments, like dedicated bus lanes, transit signal priority or queue jumps, are improvements made to the roadway to increase reliability, reduce delays and even increase safety.
Dedicated Bus Lanes provide a smoother, more reliable ride for bus riders.
Transit Signal Priority allows a bus to signal to a traffic light, either delaying or extending signal timing in favor of the bus.
Queue Jumps gives buses a head-start at a traffic signal to ease the merge back into traffic.
Combining bus priority treatments on a corridor to benefit a single route is the backbone of bus rapid transit (BRT). BRT is a type of high-quality bus transit system where buses benefit from multiple bus priority policies and infrastructure. Even without implementing full BRT, using multiple bus treatments can benefit a route more than just one isolated treatment.
We know that bus priority treatments can help buses stuck in traffic, but where should we focus our efforts?
How can we identify slow buses?
Two buses traveling between the same stops and covering the same distance may take different times.
A bus rider's time spent on the bus can vary based on the time of day they're riding as well as where they're going. Transit planners build congestion caused by traffic into bus schedules.
Using publicly-available transit schedule data (General Transit Feed Specification, GTFS ), we can identify regional bus speed trends and estimate the approximate cost of bus delays.
This study analyzed six of the seven Northern Virginia bus agencies. Fairfax City CUE was not included due to data availability issues.
Next Steps
How do we help buses stuck in traffic?
Through the study of bus speed and congestion, we can:
- Identify routes and corridors for study of potential new BRT corridors.
- Highlight opportunities for transit agencies and jurisdictions to collaborate and combine resources to overcome shared bus operation issues.
- Leverage the regional nature of Northern Virginia bus to achieve shared benefits. This kind of regional analysis allows for a holistic understanding of street congestion.
