**8. Other practical considerations**

Another approach being mentioned in the literature relates to providing facilities with exclusive or dedicated bus lanes and giving transits/busses exclusive right of way. The advantage of dedicated/dedicated bus lanes is to free busses from traffic interference and benefit transit operation. However, taking a lane from general traffic and assigning it to transit may increase general traffic travel time, specifically when congestion is high [71, 72]. Eicher and Daganzo [73] proposed a bus lane with intermittent priority which allows general traffic to use the dedicated bus lane dynamically when it is not used by busses. Their idea is applicable on bus route with low frequencies. Indeed, TSP associated with exclusive bus lane [13, 74] and TSP with intermittent priority [75] revealed improvement in bus travel time and its reliability. An example of a transit system with dedicated lane is bus rapid transit (BRT), which is an integrated system of facilities that plays a significant role in today's urban transportation and can reasonably improve bus speed, travel time, reliability, as well as serving as a catalyst for redevelopment [76]. TSP with BRT can produce significant enhancement, because in such a system, TSP can be applied to any time without being worried about queue length ahead of the transit [77]. In addition, simulation results demonstrate that applying TSP with BRT was the most

effective scenario in reducing travel times (up to 26%) and delays (up to 64%), as well as increasing bus speed (up to 47%), when it was compared to scenarios without TSP and BRT [78].

The location of bus stops along the corridor is frequently under discussion and their placement depends on the traffic demand, geometry, and policy constraints. Bus stop locations can be far-side, near-side, or mid-block. With regard to the stop setback, the near-side bus stop can change into midblock or far-side bus stop as the setback distance increases. A far-side bus stop is mostly better than a near-side bus stop [14, 79, 80]. It can either cause a very low delay or zero net-delay, whereas a near-side bus stop can reduce a delay in a few cases like reserved bus lane, but it will cause increased bus delay depending on factors like cycle length, red ratio, dwell time, and stop setback distance [79]. Cesme et al. [14] compared three main transit preferential treatments including queue jump lane, transit signal priority, and stop location evaluation over an isolated test-intersection with a fixed cycle length, and bus headway of six minutes. After extensive simulation runs under various scenarios, the results indicated that relocating the bus stop from near-side to far-side resulted in the most delay-reduction per intersection when it was compared to the two other scenarios. Results showed that a far-side bus stop was superior to the near-side one with zero setback distance. Far-side relocation's delay-saving became smaller as the dwell time at the near-side stop increased. This can be interpreted as the signal's red time and dwell time have a lot of overlap. Bus delay with near-side stops can be reduced by lowering vehicular queue interaction through increasing setback distance or decreasing signal cycle length [14, 80].
