PRISCILLA - Bus Priority Strategies and Impact Scenarios Developed on a Large Urban Area
Overview
Background & policy context:
All the 3 'users' cities (Genoa, Southampton and Toulouse) and the two industrial 'suppliers' (Elsag and Siemens) involved in PRISCILLA have gained a great deal of experience in bus priority also being involved in several EU R&D projects (PROMPT, EUROSCOPE, INCOME, CENTAUR, QUARTET PLUS, ANTARES, MOBISERVICE...). However, at the beginning of the project bus priority couldn't be considered fully mature in large urban areas (100-400 buses, 80-150 intersections, city centre and suburbs,…). The project is about bus priority in a centralised environment linking the two control systems (Urban Traffic Control for trafficlights control and Automatic Vehicle Monitoring for bus fleet management) taking into account the different individual strategies that can be implemented in the two control centres.
Objectives:
Starting from the state of the art, the scientific and technological overall goal is the demonstration of the benefits of best practice adoption of wide network bus priority strategies. More particularly, the aim is to boost the take up of existing bus priority technologies and methodologies / strategies (practices and processes) by developing them from small scale to wide networks and to produce and disseminate the lessons learnt about best practice adoption of wide bus priority systems.
The operational goals are the following:
1. To define PT priority control strategies, to be tested and adapt to the technological and organisational issues raised by the extension of the systems currently validated on a small scale to a wide city area. The effects of a generalised management of the priority functions on the traffic in a dense public and private transport network cannot be foreseen without due experimentation and, certainly, may be very different from the targeted ones, especially regarding the compromise between benefits for public transport and penalisation of private transport. Advanced priority control strategies have been defined and adopted, based on existing infrastructures and technologies, in order to optimise bus operations for complete bus routes and for the network as a whole.
2. To test different control objectives and to evaluate the main impacts of the related strategies (in terms of bus commercial speed, bus punctuality, private car travel time, acceptance of the professional users, and socioeconomic analysis). The mean to achieve the testing of the control objectives is the realisation of the measurement phase, in which after the definition of objectives (i.e. collecting data without bus priority, decreasing travel time, maintaining timetables at the main stop points,…), related strategies would be implemented on wide networks with a high number of junctions and buses and very close intersections. Measurements in Southampton have been realised by simulation modelling over the same network segments, providing results compatible with the field trials (impacts, evaluation criteria, etc.) but including also testing of a wider range of scenarios and priority control strategies. The evaluation of the related effects and impacts has been reached through a common evaluation plan, ensuring a consistency in impacts measured, even if the timing of the trials and the measurement methods might vary between sites. Existing automatic data recording facilities in t
Methodology:
PRISCILLA is originally a 20-months project, then extended to 23 months, with a specific focused experiment (Measurement phase). The workplan has been split into six different workpackages:
WP1 - Project Management,
WP2 - Current state of the art,
WP3 - Technological and organisational preparation,
WP4 - Measurement,
WP5 - Assessment and Evaluation,
WP6 - Dissemination & Use.
WP1 and WP6 (Project Management and Dissemination) were horizontal activities covering all the life cycle of the project.
PRISCILLA started with the preparation of the first deliverable D1-Presentation of the project in which the project is briefly described in order to let the overall work plan objectives clear also to non specialists.
Following D1, WP2 – Current state of the art, analysed the experiences of the introduction of bus/tram priority systems in European cities, giving a first input to the best practice guide and to the evaluation and measurement plan through its deliverable D2 – PT priority state of the art review.
The WP5 – Assessment and evaluation, included all the activities related to the validation of the applications, producing a first deliverable at the beginning of the project D3 – Evaluation plan, containing the measurement plan, and a second deliverable after the trials D4 – Evaluation results, that would be one of the main output of the project.
The WP3 - Technological and organisational preparation, covered all the adjustments (i.e. extension of radio network, hardware and software adaptation, definition of all the parameters, technical validation of the systems…) needed to put in practice the measurement plan (6 months trials) covered by WP4 – measurement phase in which different strategies have been tested following the same methodological approach, including the simulation activities in Southampton.
The other horizontal activities in the work plan is WP6 - Dissemination & Use, that has been carried on all over the life cycle of the project, producing, at the end of the project D5 - Best practice for PT priority in Europe and D7- Technology Implementation Plan (TIP) indicating exploitation intentions and containing a transferability analysis. D6 - Final Report covered all the work, objectives, results and conclusions on the project.
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