A macroscopic approach for optimizing road space allocation of bus lanes in multimodal urban networks through simulation analysis: An application to the Tokyo CBD network

Traffic congestion in urban areas leads to huge economic loss. Smart transportation systems are needed for efficient operations of the core economic activities. To develop such systems, we focus on multimodal urban transport systems, particularly on the optimization of dedicated bus lanes which is regarded as one of the most promising traffic demand management measures. Although there exists a great body of literature on the operation and planning of the dedicated bus lanes, quantitative approach is still lacked for evaluating the relationship between lane space and traffic performance, especially at the system level. In this context, [8] proposed to decide the allocation of the dedicated bus lanes based on the three-dimensional macroscopic fundamental diagram (3D-MFD). The proposed bus lane optimization framework was applied and tested utilizing the Geneva network via simulation. This paper follows the direction of the 3D-MFD based macroscopic approach, and it implements this approach, with slight modification, to the Tokyo CBD area which has a complete different and more complex network structure, to verify the robustness and the universality of the approach. We illustrate the 3D-MFD for the current network. It is found that the results of 3D-MFD are consistent with the results of [9]. That is, it is crucial to ensure certain number of buses running in the network, in order to optimize the network performance in terms of passenger service throughput.