Public Transportation Priority System using optical bus detectors

With a view to reduce traffic demands and promote the use of public mass-transit vehicles (i.e., buses), the Kumamoto Prefectural Police HQ developed an optical bus detector which can distinguish between a bus and any other ordinary vehicle traveling on the road and introduced into Kumamoto City a Public Transportation Priority System (PTPS), one of the nine subsystems in the Universal Traffic Management Systems (UTMS) concept being promoted by National Police Agency (NPA), Japan as part of the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) project. This paper discusses the background of the PTPS introduction into Kumamoto City, outlines the functions of the PTPS and the operating principle of the optical bus detector developed for the system, and touches upon the effects of the system introduction.