Cost-Effectiveness and Service Impacts of Bus Transit Priority Strategies

Transit agencies across the United States are increasingly implementing transit priority strategies to improve service reliability, travel times, operating efficiency, and customer experience. Common transit priority measures include transit signal priority (TSP), bus-only lanes, queue jumps, stop consolidation, and bulb-outs. As agencies invest in these strategies, there are increasing expectations to justify expenditures based on measurable outcomes, including travel time savings, reliability improvements, operating cost efficiencies, ridership growth, environmental benefits, safety outcomes, and return on investment. Minimal methods exist to evaluate the costs, benefits, and long-term effectiveness of transit priority treatments across varying service characteristics, roadway conditions, land use contexts, and institutional environments. TCRP Synthesis 149: Transit Signal Priority: Current State of the Practice (2020) documents current agency practices, deployment approaches, technologies, implementation challenges, and lessons learned associated with TSP. TCRP Research Report 262: Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual, 4th edition (2026) advances methods for evaluating bus speed, reliability, and capacity. Research is needed to give transit agencies guidance on evaluating, comparing, prioritizing, and implementing bus transit priority investments. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this research is to develop a guide, with supporting evaluation frameworks and decision-making tools, to enable transit agencies to assess, compare, prioritize, and communicate the costs, benefits, and effectiveness of bus transit priority strategies.

• Record URL:
  • http://apps.trb.org/cmsfeed/TRBNetProjectDisplay.asp?ProjectID=6005
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Contract to a Performing Organization has not yet been awarded.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Proposed
• Funding: $250,000.00
• Contract Numbers:

  Project H-65

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Federal Transit Administration

  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP)

  Transportation Research Board
  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Project Managers:

  Schoby, Jamaal

• Start Date: 20260908
• Expected Completion Date: 0
• Actual Completion Date: 0

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bus priority; Cost effectiveness; Level of service; Operating costs; Public transit; Reliability; Traffic signal priority; Travel time
• Subject Areas: Economics; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01973732
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Transportation Research Board
• Contract Numbers: Project H-65
• Files: TRB, RIP
• Created Date: Dec 8 2025 7:58PM