Bus priority lane in Bengaluru: A study on its effectiveness and driver stress

This paper studies the effectiveness of the bus priority lane (BPL) for public transport buses in the city of Bengaluru in India. We use the travel times on the BPL corridor as a measure of the effectiveness of the BPL. We find that there is a significant improvement in the travel times after the introduction of the BPL; for the worst 10% of the travel times, we find an improvement between 4% and 28%. Our methodology involves extracting trips on the BPL and computing the travel times for these trips from a time series of GPS information. Our methodology is scalable and can be used to compute the travel times between any two given points in other similar studies. We supplement our results with a novel test (called the D-test) for comparing the levels of stressful driving in the following scenarios: (a) morning peak hours (IST 07:00 h to 11:00 h) versus evening peak hours (IST 17:00 h to 21:00 h), and (b) northward trips versus southward trips on the BPL. We are able to infer that the drivers are generally more stressed during the morning peak hours and during the southward trips on the BPL. Partitioning the BPL into segments, we show that a majority of the segments exhibit similar effectiveness and driver stress trends as the full BPL stretch. We anticipate that corrective measures for the betterment of travel times and driver stress levels (e.g., introducing additional buses subject to vehicle re-balancing constraints, carefully planning the bus schedules to regulate bus traffic throughout the day, etc.) in some segments can lead to further improvements in travel times and reduction in driver stress levels.