Bus Priority Scheme - Macquarie Centre Queue Jump Demonstration Project

In Sydney there are about nine regional Centres in which buses will have to take on a more prominent role because the roads accessing these centres have limited capacity, and one possibility is to give buses a higher priority entering these centres. The task was to develop a model to test the bus queue jump scheme.

The Macquarie Centre area was selected for its high bus movements. A bus queue jump was coded into the Dynameq network, and the benefits evaluated.

Testing six second queue jump for buses. The yellow lines show the transit only intersection movements. These are very easily coded into Dynameq.

The results showed:

• A slight increase in the Vehicle Hours Travelled (VHT) and Vehicle Kilometres Travelled (VKT). This is expected due to the 6 seconds additional cycle time.
• Bus travel time reduced slightly, but this was not statistically significant, and
• The standard deviation of the bus travel times reduced very dramatically which made the bus queue jump especially desirable. A very significant finding indeed.