REAL-TIME arrival information at bus stops and a traffic management system which will allow buses to have priority at more than 600 junctions across Dublin will be in place from next year, Dublin City Council has said.
The council has already implemented traffic signal priority for the Luas Red and Green lines at more than 50 junctions across the city. It installed real-time information panels at each Luas stop when the trams were introduced in 2004.
It had initially intended to have real-time passenger information available at bus stops when it introduced quality bus corridors (QBCs) in the late 1990s.
However the technology was never introduced on buses to allow the system to be adopted.
The real-time system uses satellite technology to identify the position of approaching buses and update the arrival time shown on the electronic display unit.
In a report which will be presented to city councillors today, the council’s traffic department said traffic congestion problems had become “particularly acute” for buses.
“Disruptions and uncertainty regarding the arrival times of buses drastically affect the quality of service experienced by bus passengers,” it said.
The council has tested bus priority traffic signal measures, but “a widespread deployment of bus priority at traffic signals could not take place due to the lack of any equipment on board the bus which could communicate with the traffic signals”, the report said.
However, it said Bus Éireann was just completing the roll-out of automatic vehicle location system (AVLS) units on their bus fleet and Dublin Bus would have their fleet equipped by the end of 2010.
An AVLS works by calculating the bus position on the road network and reports this to a central server every 30 seconds.
The server passes the information on to the council’s own traffic control servers.
This information is then used to determine where the bus is and what type of traffic light priority it requires.
The system can be used in two ways. The first is a “queue detector” which identifies whether traffic carrying buses is backing up approaching a particular junction. It can change the light at that junction to green.
The second is a “journey detector” – a less-localised system – which works by recording the time a bus takes to pass between different points on its route. If the time exceeds a particular number of minutes, a decision can be made to give the bus priority at upcoming junctions.
The bus priority system is fully funded by the Dublin Transportation Office and is due to be introduced early next year and fully implemented by the end of 2010.
The real-time passenger information panels will use the same AVLS information and are on schedule to be introduced in the middle of next year.
However the council said their roll-out is subject to funding in next year’s budget.
