Citation

Pallela SS, Mehar A. J. Inst. Eng. India Ser. A 2023; 104(2): 367-380.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group - BMC)

DOI

10.1007/s40030-023-00720-1

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Increase in traffic flow demand on urban roads invites significant challenges in evaluation of operational performance measures and design of traffic flow facility. The complexity in design, analysis and modelling further increases due to presence of side friction in a form of curb-side bus stop. Present study is an effort on finding the impact of a curb-side bus stop on time headway and speed characteristics of traffic stream on individual lanes of four-lane divided urban roads. The field data are collected for study at four locations in two cities in India. Lane distribution analysis result indicates, more than 50% of vehicles tend to travel in inner lanes at bus stop resulting lower mean time headway in inner lane. Statistical analysis of time headway and speed data carried out to understand the vehicular behaviour by developing frequency distribution profiles. The relationship between mean time headway on inner lane and bus dwell time established to know the impact and duration of bus occupancy at curb side. The field data analysis performed at various locations showed a signification reduction in the mean speed of vehicles up to 22% due to bus stop. The present study also defined zone of influence at bus stop sections taking average speed of vehicular stream as measure of effectiveness. It is observed for every 20 m increase in zone of influence the percentage reduction in speed has been increased by 54.3%. The findings of the present study help engineers to design proper layout of bus stop facility and provide insight to manage the traffic operations on urban roads.

Language: en

Keywords

Curb-side bus stop; Lane-wise analysis; Speed; Statistical distributions; Time headway; Zone of influence