Evaluation of opening bus lanes for private traffic triggered via V2X communication

Within the EC project “iTETRIS”, an architecture for simulating traffic management applications based on vehicular communications (V2X) was designed and implemented. The work was based on evaluating the needs of a real city - the city of Bologna. Applications which try to solve the detected problems were defined and evaluated in subsequent steps. This report describes the evaluation of one of the developed applications, namely “Bus Lane Management”. It was analyzed whether it is possible to detect the traffic demand via V2X communication and open bus lanes for private vehicles. It turned out that this could be done efficiently: dedicating the free space on the bus lanes improves the average travel times and route lengths of all vehicles. However, this is true only if the penetration rates stay well below 50%. If more vehicles try to benefit, the situation deteriorates readily.