THE EFFECT OF DEDICATED BUS LANE IN A CITY CENTER

Prioritizing urban public transport in large urban agglomerations is a requirement for increasing sustainable urban mobility. Our project aimed to develop a dedicated bus lane for an urban area in Romania, Cluj-Napoca city, with a population of over 330,000 inhabitants and an active population of over 400,000 inhabitants, including young people who study in Cluj - Napoca. The introduction of the urban dedicated bus lane required traffic reorganization and optimization of the signalized intersections. A challenge in the development of the project was the variability of the width of the streets, which imposed specific measures to reorganize traffic. Throughout the dedicated bus lane alignment, the streets are one-way but intersect only with two-way streets. In these conditions, it was necessary to identify distinct solutions for harmonizing the dedicated bus lane with the general traffic. We have developed this project from conception and implementation to monitoring the use of dedicated public transport lane. One year after the inauguration of this project, we got the following results: bus travel time decreased, the number of passengers using public transport increased, general traffic flow remained almost within the same values, with a slight decrease. From a traffic safety point of view, during the first year of use of the dedicated public transport lane there was only one light collision. This project was developed at the request of the Cluj - Napoca City Hall, Romania.