Task Order 5603
Transit Operations Research


Development of Deployment Strategy
for an Integrated BRT System

Wei-Bin Zhang
California PATH
and
National Bus Rapid Transit Institute (NBRTI)
Institute of Transportation Studies
University of California at Berkeley

Summary

BRT is different from traditional transit service by incorporating many rail transit features. It also differs from traditional rail with its flexibility and the possibility for incremental deployment. In deployment planning for BRT, one of the major elements is to determine how the deployment of a BRT system will be phased in. To our best knowledge there is no rigorous way to do it. For instance, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA) has deployed BRT services on the Wilshire corridor in two stages: Phase I and II based primarily on prior experience and expert judgment. Under a contract with the Federal Transit Administration in concert with the U.S. BRT Consortium, a consultant created a brochure depicting four phases for BRT system deployment that seems to follow a rather artificial "one-size-fits-all" approach to BRT deployment. Instead, the phases or stages of BRT deployment should be decided after a careful systematic analysis. When and which BRT element should be implemented is a tradeoff between the costs associated with it, its ease of implementation (physical constraints and institutional issues) and resultant benefits.

One of PATH's on-going research projects is developing a planning framework to determine a set of optimal combinations of BRT attributes given the budgetary, institutional and other types of constraints. Deployment phasing issues are beyond the scope of the project and have not been addressed. Yet, it identified deployment phasing as one of the critical issues that deserves careful exploration in order to achieve cost-effective deployment.

The second major issue identified through the on-going BRT planning project is the issue of integrated deployment of advanced technologies. In almost all BRT deployments, ITS and bus technologies have been applied to BRT, however, in less than a fully integrated manner. For example, the current bus data communication system has not yet considered many BRT features therefore many of the add-on functions and features can not be integrated with the current bus system. As another example, a transit bus that is instrumented with advanced communication systems (ACS), signal priority systems, and bus arrival information functions is often equipped with three separate positioning systems. There are also plenty of examples that data collected by the advanced location and communication systems were archived but not used by many agencies. This non-integrated approach to add-on technologies creates several issues, in particular:

  1. It inevitably increases the cost of the BRT system to the extent that transit agencies are often forced to make a careful selection of the technologies that offer greater benefits, even though other technologies may also provide substantial benefit.
  2. The non-integrated systems become unnecessarily complicated, which not only creates significant maintenance hassles but also significantly reduces the reliability of the overall system.
  3. The applications various ITS technologies are not integrated. Specifically, data collected from one system often can not be used by the other systems and few application tools are available to take advantage of the significant amount of data collected by new technologies.
Therefore, integrated deployment of ITS technologies is urgently needed for transit applications, particularly for BRT.

NBRTI at UCB proposes to conduct research on issues and methods for integrated planning and deployment strategies for integrated BRT systems. This proposed study will evaluate the current BRT planning methodologies and practices, ongoing PATH BRT planning studies and summarize the needs, issues and options related to BRT planning, design, technology implementation, operation, and maintenance. This study will then investigate the cost / benefit implications of these options and develop a systematic methodology for deployment phasing planning and implementation concepts for integrating BRT technologies.

This research will develop a comprehensive matrix of BRT planning, design, technology and operation options, associated costs and benefits, and recommendations on approaches and deployment issues for achieving an integrated BRT system. The output of this research will provide transit agencies and BRT-interested professionals critical information and decision support tools for their planning, design and implementation of the BRT.

The goal of the proposed study is to develop cost-effective planning and deployment strategies for an integrated bus rapid system system. The study has two objectives: (1) to develop a systematic methodology for deployment phasing planning and (2) to develop implementation concepts for integrating BRT technologies.

Methodologies

For the purpose of deployment phasing planning, the proposed systematic methodology will consist of both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The results are aimed at helping transit agencies to determine how many phases the deployment plan may have and what BRT elements should be included in each stage, and understand the characteristics that each phase of a BRT system can offer and the capital costs associated with it. These results are of immediate interest to transit agencies for deployment of cost-effective BRT systems.

To address the second objective, the study will employ a systems engineering approach to analyze BRT functional requirements and to define both logical and physical architecture for BRT. Based on these analyses and available transit ITS and other advanced technologies, concepts for integrated implementation of technologies will be developed.

The study will also identify major technical and institutional challenges of these integrated concepts, suggest feasible approaches to address them, and design the system framework for eventual deployment. More importantly, the advantages and benefits of these integrated concepts will be examined thoroughly.