Real-time arterial travel time estimation has been a very challengeable task due to the complexity of urban street traffic behaviors and the lack of high resolution and high quality data. However, travel time information is considered as one of the most important tools to manage arterial flow.This study developed a series of data processing methods to estimate arterial travel time and level of service (LOS) based on real-time bus rapid transit (BRT) bus data and signal timing data. BRT buses have a few advantages over local buses in serving as probe vehicles to measure arterial performance. A few data processing procedures were introduced in this paper to estimate the arterial travel time by converting bus trajectory to general traffic travel time. The arterial travel time is estimated by adding thebus queuing delay, average traffic signal waiting time, and traffic free flow travel time together. To verify the effectiveness of the developed method, a field testing was conducted. Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) BRT buses together with IntelliDrive corridor were selected as the datasources. The testing results demonstrate that the proposed method estimated arterial travel time and level of service well based on BRT probe data and traffic signal data. The root mean square error (RMSE) and root mean square percentage error (RMSPE) for the estimation of travel time are 49 seconds and 9%. The accuracy for the estimation of LOS is 73%.
Abstract