Study on Travel Time Characteristics of Hubli-Dharwad Bus Rapid Transit System in Comparison with Heterogeneous Traffic Lane

Abstract

Bus Rapid Transit System, which is also known as BRTS, is a very effective transit system in terms of travel time reduction. It has advantages compared to conventional road-based public transport like dedicated lane and pre-board fare collections. In the current study, performance-based travel time characteristics like travel time and travel speeds are evaluated by conducting the speed and delay survey for the BRT buses and private vehicles separately. The survey was performed by moving the car observation method to find out travel time and respective delays that are currently hampering the operations. Speed and delay survey for BRT buses was performed through the manual observation by travelling in the bus. Based upon the study, it has been found that there is a positive side effect of a dedicated corridor on the operation of BRTS buses, as obtained trial running speed values are almost very near to measured free-flow speed values on the selected study corridors. Meanwhile, it has been observed that the BRTS bus operation has faced many delays due to bus bunching, dwell time at the stations and delays at the intersections but delays occurring at the stations have contributed major proportion in the total delay. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.