Value of Dedicated Right-of-Way: Transit Service Reliability and User Impacts

Project summary:

In urban areas with dense and mixed land use and high traffic, transit service provides a sustainable way to connect people to jobs and opportunities and create multimodal and vibrant areas around serviced corridors. Reviews of national and international transit services have proved that service reliability is often among the most requested service improvements and plays a significant role in reducing travel costs, increasing ridership, and attracting and retaining users. Recent studies have used automatic vehicle location (AVL), automated passenger count (APC), and/or automated fare collection (AFC) data to derive reliability measures. However, there has been limited research that investigates the impacts of dedicated right-of-way on service reliability using these automatic transit data. This project will examine how service reliability varies across transitways and service corridors and what factors are strongly associated with low/high service reliability. The project will tackle crucial and timely questions from different angles. Specifically, the outcomes will be informative for agencies in evaluating the benefits of dedicated right-of-way, leading to informed decisions about funding future projects such as the planning and implementation of bus priority lanes.