Using GPS Trajectories to Adaptively Plan Bus Lanes

Since bus prioritization policies can help mitigate urban traffic jams, the planning of bus lanes has drawn considerable attention. Existing methods suffer from a common limitation, which is that the limited spatial adaptability resulting from certain road condition information cannot be directly specified. Many bus GPS trajectories have been accumulated and can be contiguously gathered if needed. This paper proposes a trajectory-based bus lane planning method. First, we formulize the bus lane planning problem as a multiobjective optimization problem in which the road conditions, traffic flow, connectivity of bus lanes, and construction cost are organized as four constraints, and road utilization and bus punctuality are modeled as two objectives. Then, an evolutionary algorithm-based method is presented to solve the problem. We tested the model in the Nanshan District, Shenzhen City, China. Through a comparison with existing survey-based methods, the parameters associated with road conditions in this method are directly extracted from GPS trajectories, and this method is more effectively deployed than other methods. Since GPS trajectories can cover a wide area if needed, and because the proposed method can be effectively executed, this method can be adapted to large urban scales.