Public transportation priority system using optical bus detectors

With a view to reduce traffic demands and promote the use of public mass-transit vehicles (i.e., buses), the Kumamoto Prefectural Police HQ developed an optical bus detector which can distinguish between a bus and any other ordinary vehicle traveling on the road, and introduced a public transportation priority system (PTPS) into Kumamoto City, one of the nine sub-systems in the universal traffic management systems concept being promoted by the National Police Agency of Japan, as part of the intelligent transport systems project. This paper discusses the background of introducing the PTPS into Kumamoto City, outlines the functions of the PTPS and the operating principle of the optical bus detector developed for the system, and comments on the effects of the system introduced