“Bus rapid transit is, like, the thing right now,” said Tim Menard, CEO and founder of LYT. “Transit is in a huge renaissance.” His transportation technology company works to integrate priority vehicles like emergency or transit vehicles into a city’s traffic management system.
LYT has worked with cities including Portland, Ore.; San Jose, Calif.; and Boston to give certain vehicles more priority on the roadways than others, using technology to introduce signal priority as cities themselves move forward with projects like dedicated bus lanes.
Transit organizations have been quick to embrace bus rapid transit (BRT) routes along primary corridors as solutions to decrease travel times — removing buses from clogged city streets by giving them their own lane. However, in a number of cases, travel times can still be improved simply through better signal timing giving priority to buses.
In Boston, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), the city’s public transit provider, initiated “a proof-of-concept integration pilot” with LYT to use the technology in coordination with traffic signal control technology on three busy intersections.
“These intersections are notoriously difficult to cross,” said Alexandra Hallowell, MBTA director of transit priority. “The intersections zig-zag through a busy and bustling community with dozens of local shops and restaurants. The area has thousands of pedestrians and bicycles, not to mention thousands of drivers who travel through this area to reach key connections to several major thoroughfares.”
After two months of observation, outbound buses are gaining an average of 12 seconds per trip, with inbound buses improving travel times by 18 seconds per trip, MBTA said.
“Again, these are early indications that are positive and require a more robust analysis by MBTA staff,” Hallowell said via email.
MBTA buses already operate with transit signal priority technology across “dozens of locations across the commonwealth,” she pointed out. “But this pilot is investigating LYT’s unique approach to bus detection and signaling.”
In Portland, Ore., buses traveling in mixed traffic using LYT technology reduced their red light wait times by 80 percent over 15 miles, Menard said, adding that 60 percent of that performance improvement came solely from traffic signal optimization.
LYT’s technology uses GPS and artificial intelligence to optimize traffic management systems and signals for priority vehicles like buses or emergency vehicles.
The benefits of transit-signal priority are multiplied in Portland, considering the technology is used on the busy Capitol Highway corridor, which serves eight bus lines in mixed traffic. The traffic signal technology — which is communicating with the bus — ensures all traffic ahead of the bus is moving and clears the intersection.
“That’s really important for people walking or biking to make sure they have the time they need to cross the street,” said Luke Norman, a senior planner with TriMet, the region’s public transit operator, in an explainer video it produced.
San Jose, in California’s Bay Area, has taken a transit-first policy where buses are prioritized across transportation planning. The city’s transportation department uses LYT for transit-signal priority along some Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority (VTA) bus routes, said Colin Heyne, public information manager for the San Jose Department of Transportation.
The approach in San Jose and many cities, Menard said, has been to have buses operate more efficiently in mixed traffic, rather than adding a multitude of bus-only lanes.
“That itself has just brought over 50 percent improvements just across … 50 miles now of coverage, and continually growing. That’s been huge,” said Menard.
The travel improvements resulting from transit signal priority (TSP) technology are most apparent on heavily traveled corridors, transit officials said. In Boston, the MBTA has developed its Transit Priority Vision, which identifies the 26 corridors in its bus network with the highest rider delay — a function of heavy traffic and high ridership, Hallowell said. Those corridors comprise just 10 percent to 15 percent of the network, but carry 80 percent of all bus riders, so targeting transit priority here improves travel times and reliability for more than 320,000 daily riders.
“Investing in transit priority treatments such as signal priority is extremely important for the future of MBTA bus service,” she said. “There’s no silver bullet in transportation planning, but TSP is a critical component of our program’s success.”
It’s hard to say whether buses speeding past traffic is enough to increase ridership. However, in San Jose, VTA ridership for the first six months of this year was up 15.1 percent compared to the same period in 2023, according to statistics compiled by the American Public Transit Association (APTA). Ridership on TriMet grew 11 percent in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2023. Overall transit ridership in Boston was down 1.2 percent for the first six months of 2024; however, bus ridership was up 6.5 percent, according the APTA.
"Bus rapid transit is exploding everywhere,” Menard said, adding, “if you talk to any transit agency today, they’re going to have some level of planning in their system network that’s either already underway or in development for it.”
