Adaptive urban bimodal (car and transit) transportation system management in saturated and oversaturated conditions

This research focuses on traffic and transit operation (bimodal) in mixed flow congested corridors. To increase transit ridership and modal share, the relative advantage of transit travel times compared to car travel times has to improve. To achieve this objective, this research focuses on three areas of traffic management, the philosophical framework, the development of traffic engineering control techniques, and the evaluation framework. These three areas are tightly interconnected and the successful implementation of bimodal transportation management is not likely without a coordinated development of all three.;The prevailing philosophical framework that provides the foundation to most traditional transportation planning and traffic engineering theories and practices has been reviewed. The research concludes that a number of aspects of the philosophical framework will have to change to address the problem of traffic management in congested conditions in an effective way.;The main focus of this research is on the development of bimodal traffic engineering control techniques for saturated and oversaturated conditions that improve the travel time advantage of transit vehicles while maintaining the existing vehicular capacity of the roadway infrastructure. These measures belong to the family of transit queue jumps but they are more complex than the typical queue jump because they involve queue management as well. A number of signal control algorithms are developed for the purpose of queue management. An innovative approach, based on fuzzy logic, is also used in some of the control algorithms.;Queue management is a dynamic process and requires continuous data collection. Data collection is not an issue in a simulation environment, but gathering reliable data for real-world applications is. A method based on fuzzy logic and ANFIS (Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System) tuning technique using detector occupancy data is developed for assessing the number of vehicles approaching an intersection.;The evaluation and justification of bimodal traffic management measures is problematic with traditional traffic engineering or transportation planning performance measures. Traditional traffic engineering performance measures (e.g. mean vehicle delay) have a single mode perspective, and existing transit or transportation planning related measures of performance (e.g. transit modal share) are not directly linked to traffic operations. Performance measures designed for the evaluation of bimodal traffic control techniques in saturated and oversaturated conditions are proposed.