Empirical Assessment on Factors Affecting Travel Time of Bus Rapid Transit

Since the beginning of the century, many cities around the world adopt the bus rapid transit (BRT) system to fulfill their need of mass transportation system. The system features with platform-level boarding, bus lanes in the central verge of the road, off-vehicle fare collection, and physically protected busway. So far, these criteria are considered to be the most important aspects with respect to the BRT performance. In this research, we intend to study to what extent the BRT performance may be affected by the interference of the mixed traffic during the BRT operation. We adopt an empirical approach by observing the phenomenon unfolding in the eleven TransJakarta BRT corridors. The TransJakarta BRT operates in the city of Jakarta, the capital of the Republic of Indonesia. We record the travel time data from station to station for the case where the TransJakarta bus can travel smoothly and the case where the traveling bus is interfered with the mixed traffic. For the cases, we evaluate the travel time variation. As the results, we found that the Corridor 1 of TransJakarta BRT has the best performance in term of the travel time variation. For the two directions, the corridor has the mean travel time of 34 min, the standard deviation of 3 min, and the travel time variation of 8%. On this corridor, the mixed-traffic interference is relatively negligible. On the Corridor 7, the two-direction travel times have the mean of 45 min, the standard deviation of 8 min, and the travel time variation of 16%. On the Corridor 9, the twodirection travel times have the mean of 1 hr and 25 min, the standard deviation of 11 min, and the travel time variation of 14%. On the last two corridors, the busways are heavily interfered by the mixed traffic; thus, the end-to-end travel times are significantly uncertain although only very few road segments are interfered. The research leads us to a conclusion that the interference, although only occurs on a road segment, may compromise the end-to-end travel time considerably. Keyword-Bus Rapid Transit (BRT); Travel Time; Travel Time Reliability; Buffer Time Index; Busway