ITS Assignment 1

Efforts by: Chelumalla Rishi Revanth, 18118

Understanding TSP as a strategic technique
Traffic Congestion has become a serious issue with the growing urbanisation of various cities
in developing countries like India & China. Usage of public transport systems is the first
thought that we would get to our mind when we think of reducing traffic congestion. But
what we see in our daily life is the opposite. The general public prefers to use their personal
transport modes for the daily commute in majority of the cities. The reason for this partly is
the ill developed infrastructure for traffic management leading to long delays and multiple
halts in public transport modes. Hence if we can somehow tackle this problem of long delays
or travel times of public transport systems then we would be heading towards a much
efficient world.
In short, TSP is a series of techniques developed to improve the service and delay time
of various transportation modes, especially busses & other mass transit vehicles at
intersections which are governed by signalized systems. Transit priority can provided along
two dimension, space & time. Spatial priority is when the vehicles are provided an exclusive
lane for them to pass through with minimal delay. However this is not always feasible given
the space constraints in majority of the cities of Indian & China. The other option which is
temporal priority sets to provide exclusive time for the mass transit vehicles to pass through
without having to wait through the long queues. This is achieved by tweaking the fixed traffic
signal phase times which is common place in many cities and providing priority passages to
the respective priority vehicles. This technique would eventually improve the ridership of
these mass transit systems thereby reducing the load on daily traffic (congestion reduction)
& also would contribute positively to the environment by bringing about a drastic reduction
in GHG emissions.
As suggested by the paper in this context, TSP techniques are affected by the following
factors:
1. Network configuration: number of lanes, pedestrian presence, number of
signalized intersections, the existence of exclusive bus lanes, and bus stop location
2. Traffic demands: degree of saturation at the cross street, traffic volume of left-turn
movement, traffic volume of passenger cars, and bus demand at the cross-street;
3. Transit service characteristics: number of detected buses, bus arrival distribution,
bus arrival sequence, bus dwelling time, bus delay and the type of bus operation.

One very intuitive yet complex thing that we need to keep in mind is the fact that
every reaction in a system has an equal and opposite reaction. So when we provide priority
to a certain sets of vehicles using TSP, we are essentially reducing the load on them by
decreasing the delay times to pass through signals. Therefore this load has to be bore by the
competing traffic which can be both vehicles travelling in other directions or the same

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direction. Such effects can be seen in the simple TSP strategies where the green time phases
are either increased or the red ones are truncated. These strategies essentially reduce the
passage capacity of other traffic comprising of non-priority vehicles and during a peak period,
the problem can exponentially escalate to greater heights for these vehicles until their
progression is brought back to normal state. Another interesting problem that we might get
into is the inefficient use of the increased green times or reduced red times where the priority
vehicles might not be present throughout the entire duration of those extensions. Hence the
benefit would trickle down to a very small portion of priority vehicles depending upon their
arrival rates and probability distribution.
Few other researchers have tried to tackle the above problem by keeping the cycle length
flexible within a boundary. What this method would do is that it wouldn’t disrupt the existing
phase duration thereby not effecting the non-priority vehicles a lot, but would increase the
green time in that cycle thereby providing a scope to benefit a larger fleet of vehicles. But
again in this case, the load would go onto the cross street movements, where pedestrians or
other vehicles would have to wait longer for their turn to come by. Few ways in which TSP is
used to provide temporal priority is given below :
GREEN EXTENSION : extra green time for a detected transit vehicle to pass through an
intersection

GREEN REALLOCATION : the green phase is moved temporally to accommodate the

requests of priority vehicles arriving at a point in time during the cycle.

RED TRUNCATION : Reduction in red phase time to provide more green time.

Models of TSP
TSP can be broadly classified into two types based on the priority techniques they employ :
1. Passive Priority
2. Active Priority

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Let’s delve into each of the above approaches individually.
Passive Priority
As the name suggests, passive priority provides benefits passively with a pre-determined set
of traffic signal plans. This method does not account for the presence or no presence of a bus
before providing priority. Hence essentially there is very minimal interaction between the
traffic signal system and the components of traffic, i.e. vehicles. This is achieved by assuming
a distribution of the arrivals of vehicles (busses in particular). Hence this method is efficient
only when there are very low fluctuations in the traffic volumes of priority vehicles and the
dwell times of busses at stops. Also, a high proportion of priority vehicles in a given set of
traffic would be preferable. Implementing passive priority is simple and inexpensive given the
low involvement of technology and infrastructural changes. But as technology improves and
becomes cheaper, moving to active priority techniques would be suggested. There are many
ways in which we can implement passive priority, some of them which are discussed in the
paper are as follows :
I. Adjustment of cycle length and signal timings
Tweaking the cycle length and signal timings has its own advantages and
disadvantages. If we increase the cycle length, we would allow more no. of vehicles to
pass through a given phase thereby improving the throughput. This is because minimal
time would be lost in the interchanging of cycles between different directions. The
contrasting argument to this would be that, vehicles facing a red light would have to
wait longer times before they can pass through thereby causing impatience for the
travellers. Similarly a short cycle length would help in reducing the waiting times of
priority vehicles at the red signal, but would also reduce the throughput of the
intersection especially when it is congested.

II. Splitting Phases

In this method, the entire duration of green time in a cycle is scattered along the cycle
length and is not provided all at once. The advantage with this is that it can cater to
priority vehicles arriving at different points in a cycle thereby can accommodate
variability in arrivals effectively. However, the flip side to this would be the significant
amount of time lost in the multiple transitions of phases in a given cycle and also
provide haphazard variable times for pedestrians crossing the roads.

III. Area–wide Signal Timing Plan

In this method an overall plan for all the intersections in a particular segment of road
is developed based on the operational features of priority vehicles in that area. But
this becomes difficult to implement in reality due to high fluctuations in dwell times
of busses.

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IV. Metering Vehicle
In this approach, the priority vehicles are given a benefit at the cost of other non-
priority vehicles where in a restriction or a constraint is placed upon their entry into
congested areas, thereby providing incentives to priority vehicles.

Active Priority
Active priority in contrast to passive priority control, does a real time dynamic control of the
signal plan rather than hard coding it. This is achieved through placing sensors upstream of
the intersections to detect an incoming priority vehicle so that the controller can suggest an
appropriate strategy given the scenario. As given in the paper, active priority can be further
classified into two types :
1. Rule based priority control
As the name suggests, this approach relies on a set of rules to provide priority to
vehicles such as bus presence and delay. In the unconditional priority approach, we
only consider the presence of a bus for allocating priority and do not look at the delay
with which each bus is travelling. As is the case, the controller might receive multiple
requests at the same time thereby having to follow a set of rules for allocation of
priority to these vehicles. Few examples of such rules are given in the paper,
developed by (Dion and Hesham, 2005). Few other methods of providing priority
actively are queue jumper lane, wherein the busses are provided an exclusive lane to
cut through the traffic and access the green signal early.

2. Model based priority control

This method in contrast to the rule based approach takes into consideration other
parameters such as bus readiness, bus operational condition, traffic status, etc to
prioritize busses based on a mathematical model. This method provides a good
assessment of the performance of the busses with and without the usage of TSP
thereby providing insights into the effectiveness of TSP as a traffic management
technique. Based on the evaluation objective model based approaches can be further
classified into two types : minimizing total bus passenger delay and total person delay.
Performance evaluation of TSP

There are three kinds of tests that one can perform to evaluate the performance of TSP as a
technique :

1. Analytical Evaluation
2. Simulation Test
3. Field Test

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The first two tests are performed in the planning phase to evaluate the feasibility of the
system and also to check the particular improvements obtained by implementing TSP. The
third test which is the Field test is costly and complex to implement and hence is taken up
only once the system is approved from the first two tests. Few common performance
parameters that are considered are :

1. reduction in bus travel time or travel delay (time savings), which is one of the most
significant and useful indexes;
2. Improvement in bus travel speed;
3. Variance of headways under headway-based operations that is related to bus waiting
passenger's delay;
4. Improvement of bus schedule adherence under schedule-based operations to reflect
the deviation between actual arrival time and scheduled one;
5. Passenger-car driver's delay variance to evaluate the impacts of TSP controls on
passenger cars, especially for non-prioritized approaches;
6. Total person delay reduction to assess the impacts of TSP methods on the entire
intersection or arterial;
7. Number of bus vehicles blocked by red signals along the arterial which is used in the
city of Beijing, China;
8. Reduction in stop time used in the city of Kawasaki, Japan, to capture the timeliness
of TSP operations;
9. Increase in queue length at the non-prioritized approaches to evaluate the impacts on
non-prioritized approaches.
References

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X14003556
2. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jat/2017/7696094/
3. http://crowdsourced-transport.com/working-pages/improve-public-transport/traffic-signal-
priority/
4. https://nacto.org/publication/transit-street-design-guide/intersections/signals-
operations/active-transit-signal-priority/
5. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266375674_Transit_Signal_Priority_Control_at_
Signalized_Intersections_A_Comprehensive_Review

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