Critical Station Practical Capacity on a Bus Rapid Transit Line with Nonstopping Buses

Abstract

Bus rapid transit (BRT) can offer transit mobility to meet growing travel demands by cost-effectively providing high capacity and quality of service. It is adaptable to a wide range of operating conditions and technological advancements. Stations are elements that typically control BRT line capacity, so it is essential to understand the operation of any potentially critical station to understand and manage the facility. The Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual (TCQSM) provides the standard methodology for capacity estimation. However, that model does not account for important operational aspects including the stochastic nature of many parameters beyond dwell time, along with nonstopping buses’ capacity, the degrees of saturation of the stopping and nonstopping bus streams, and the upstream average waiting time and queue length of stopping buses. We adapted the theory developed by Hisham et al. for an onstreet bus stop, to reflect the operational conditions of a BRT station and to account for these aspects. This new reliability-based capacity model tailored to BRT facilities provided superior insight into station bus capacity and quality of service to the TCQSM model.