A STUDY ON IMPROVEMENT OF BUS-BAY DESIGN

Abstract

Bus bays have been introduced in a lot of bus stops in Japan especially where stopping buses without bays would block traffic stream seriously. In that sense, bus-bays in Japan have been evaluated as successful cases. However, based on some observations, buses in bus-bays do not stop closely at curbs, which make boarding and alighting passengers inconvenient due to big gap between buses and curbs. There might be several reasons why buses do not stop closely at curbs, including driving technical issues by bus drivers, some psychological issues for them and traffic conditions at streets. Among them, designing of bus bay is thought to be one of the factors to improve the situation. Some advanced designing can be observed in a few bus terminals but not in bus stops on the streets presumably due to safety consideration under mixed traffic condition. The authors have made several experiments to propose a new-shaped bus-bay applicable to regular streets. The proposal was applied to the real bus stop in Tokyo, which was evaluated as successful based on the observation survey and the interview survey towards the bus drivers.