Efficiency in Motion: Enhancing Urban Mobility with Transit Signal Priority Systems

Joseph Craven
2 min readApr 10, 2024

--

Transit Signal Priority (TSP) helps in making use of existing vehicle location and wireless communication technology to extend the green light of a traffic signal in allowing a Pace bus or CTA help to reduce travel times ensure arrivals on time and proceed with an intersection when the bus is way behind schedule.

While discussing Transit Signal Priority, the basic reality is that using Preemption and Priority settings for traffic signals can change the signal timing and prioritize certain types of vehicles such as emergency vehicles, trucks, buses, or trains. This system aims to speed up travel times, helps improve safety, and provides a way for priority vehicles to arrive at their next destination.

More than 50 percent of the area’s transit riders can take benefit of faster, more dependent on bus service. On Transit Signal Priority equipped buses, riders will see remarkably lesser traffic signal delays, allowing them to reach their destinations on time — with lesser interruption to general traffic flow. Traffic signal synchronization will be significantly improved along these corridors as a section of the Transit Signal Priority (TSP) program.

The main objectives of traffic signal priority are:-

• It helps lessen the time taken while passing through an intersection area. In some urban areas, buses and trams may pass through several signalized intersections. The longer delay at all the intersections can add up to many minutes to the total trip time, leading to increased resource needs and operating costs.

• It also minimizes the discrepancy of time taken in passing through an intersection area. The collective impact over all the signalized intersections can amount to several minutes on a route. The effect can be even more extreme if signal cycle times are prolonged. This variance can affect reliability and timekeeping and can cause bunching. So decreasing variance is usually the main objective for having traffic signal priority for public transport vehicles.

• It also helps support buses and trams to make movements that are not allowed for general traffic safely. This is generally executed in association with other traffic management attempts such as entrance to busways, bus-only streets, cut-throughs at roundabouts, or contraflow bus lanes.

For the Transit Signal Priority (TSP) program, connect with the EMTRAC system. Call Emtrac at (214) 607–0100, Mobile: at (618) 316–4633, email: Info@Emtracsystems.Com.

--

--