Transit Service Planning
Transit Service Planning
PTV offers a variety of professional services to assist transit agencies with planning and optimizing the delivery of transit services. These services center around the application of our PTV Vision Suite, which has been successfully applied in North America and throughout the world to analyze and optimize transit performance at all levels of detail (e.g., system, corridor, route, trip). PTV’s extensive transit experience includes two broad areas – transit planning and transit operations – with specific services including:
- Service planning
- Ridership and forecast model development
- Integration of BRT and LRT into traffic and pedestrian environments
- Regional prioritization of transit corridors
- Fare revenue sharing plans and pricing studies
Transit Planning
PTV provides extensive transit planning services. PTV’s breadth of experience in this area is well suited to assist transit agencies of varying sizes with developing their near- and long-term service plans. PTV’s experience includes:
- Developing and applying regional transit operation and ridership models
- Assessing and estimating route-based transit operating parameters and performance, capital and operating costs, fare revenue, peak vehicle requirements, etc.
- Developing fare revenue sharing programs (e.g., multiple operator environments)
- Analyzing multiple transit service plan alternatives (e.g., comparisons based on customer satisfaction indicators, quality of service, operator impacts, revenue and costs)
- Forecasting transit ridership and mode splits
- Optimize schedules to minimize passenger transfer delay or other quality of service objectives
- Balancing transit supply and demand using passenger transfer flows, vehicle and overall fleet requirements
- Prioritizing regional transit corridors for investments in transit preferential treatments
- Analyzing all types of transit preferential treatments (e.g., TSP, BRT, queue jumps, etc.)
Transit Operations
PTV has worked on numerous bus and light rail operational assessments. These projects have involved applying VISSIM to develop operating plans, recommend context sensitive transit preferential treatments, assess transit benefits, evaluate and mitigate traffic impacts and develop a level of consensus among stakeholders to move projects forward. The firm has conducted more than 60 bus and light rail projects in North America. PTV’s technical experience regarding transit and traffic operations is extensive and diverse. Examples include:
- Working with stakeholders with diverse interests
- Analyzing and recommending transit preferential treatments for buses in constrained physical environments
- Transit signal priority (TSP)
- Queue jumps—traditional, left turn
- Queue bypass lanes
- Exclusive transit lanes – center and curb-side alignments
- Intermittent transit lanes
- Assessing bus stop relocation and consolidation strategies
- Designing TSP timing plans and control parameters
- Deploying hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation systems to test TSP parameters in traffic signal controllers
- Conducting BRT and TSP workshops to facilitate deployment
- Performing before and after field studies
