Peter Furth

• Northeastern University

Where signalized pedestrian crossings run concurrently with vehicles, the permitted conflict between right-turning vehicles and pedestrians can be mitigated by giving pedestrians a head start. With a head start, pedestrians can establish themselves in the crosswalk before right-turning traffic can get there, reinforcing pedestrians’ priority and en...

In the United States, traffic signal timing is traditionally developed to minimize motor vehicle delay at signalized intersections, with minimal attention paid to the needs of pedestrians and bicyclists. The unintended consequence is often diminished safety and mobility for pedestrians and bicyclists. The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research...

Emerging micromobility services provide not only new transportation options, but also valuable sources of data for researchers and planners seeking to understand traveler behavior and preferences and to improve transportation networks. Dockless systems for shared bicycles and electric scooters have recently begun operating in many American cities,...

One-way restrictions on local streets, which tend to have low traffic stress, can create a significant barrier to low-stress cycling. Contraflow, a treatment that undoes one-way restrictions on bike travel, has the potential to improve low-stress connectivity. Although contraflow is applied routinely in the Netherlands and Belgium, it has been spar...

At signalized intersections, permitted left turns (i.e., on a green ball, after yielding) across multiple through lanes and across a separated bike lane or bike path present a threat to bicyclist safety. A conflict study of two such intersections with a bidirectional bike path found that when cyclists cross while a vehicle is ready to turn left and...

Crossing islands at unsignalized intersections, in addition to their pedestrian crossing safety benefits, can also serve as speed control chicanes by forcing vehicles to make a reverse curve. A method is developed for determining the chicane length (and thus, parking setback) needed for a two-lane road for a given lane width, island width, and targ...

While pedestrian recall results in a moderate reduction in pedestrian delay because, with recall, a pedestrian arriving during the time nominally reserved for the Walk interval will be served immediately rather than waiting to be served in the next cycle, it can also lead to longer cycle lengths, increasing delay for all users, including pedestrian...

How to make city cycling—the most sustainable means of travel—safe, practical, and convenient for all. Cycling is the most sustainable means of urban travel, practical for most short- and medium-distance trips—commuting to and from work and school, shopping, visiting friends—as well as for recreation and exercise. Cycling promotes physical, social,...

Many cities in the United States are working to become more “bike-friendly” through the provision of new bike infrastructure that is safe and attractive for all types of cyclists, from the timid to assured. These efforts are supported by evidence associating low level of traffic stress facilities with increased cycling activity rates and co-benefit...

Low-stress bike networks are often disconnected, with gaps or barriers that make travel between two points impossible without riding on high-stress roads. Barriers can also force long detours that people are not willing to make. Although existing methods of low-stress bike network analysis have been used to point out some barriers, a method was nee...

When pedestrian, bike crossings, or both are concurrent with a vehicular phase, leading through intervals (LTI) and leading pedestrian intervals (LPI) are signalization techniques that provide a partially protected crossing. With LPI, for a short interval at the start of the crossing phase all traffic is held, enabling some pedestrians to arrive at...

When road segments with high traffic stress are excluded, the remaining network of low-stress roads and trails can be fragmented, lacking connections between many origin-destination pairs or requiring onerous detour. Low-stress connectivity is a measure of the degree to which origins (for this study, homes) and destinations (jobs) can be connected...

Although controlling speed on urban arterials is important for safety, conventional traffic calming techniques cannot usually be applied on arterials, and many jurisdictions prohibit automated speed enforcement. Moreover, unlike unidirectional arterials, bidirectional arterials with short intersection spacing are not amenable to green waves that ca...

As transit agencies and road owners adopt the objective of protecting transit from congestion, it becomes important to have a method for measuring the cost that congestion imposes on transit. Congestion impacts transit both by lowering average speed and by increasing service unreliability. Altogether, five congestion impacts were identified: increa...

This paper introduces a new method to prioritize bicycle improvement projects based on accessibility to important destinations, such as grocery stores, banks, and restaurants. Central to the method is a new way to classify “bicycling stress” using marginal rates of substitution which are commonly developed through empirical behavioral research on b...

Reducing bus delay beyond what can be achieved with conventional transit signal priority requires making and responding to longer-range predictions of bus arrival time, which include dwell time at an upstream stop. At the same time, priority decisions based on such uncertain predictions should be reversible if the dwell time should be much longer t...

If the vehicular phase concurrent with a pedestrian phase is running under fully actuated control or is a noncoordinated phase under coordinated-actuated control, the length of its green is not known when the phase begins; it could run anywhere between a (known) minimum and maximum green, depending on when a gap is detected. In such a case, walk in...

When streets with high traffic stress—on which the mainstream population is unwilling to ride a bike—are removed, the remaining network of streets and paths can be fragmented and poorly connected. This paper describes the development of methods to visualize and to analyze the lack of connectivity in a low-stress bicycling network. A proposed measur...

Where there are high turn volumes or speeds, pedestrian and bicycle crossings may need to be protected from right turns as well as left turns. Cycle tracks may need protected crossings even where right-turn volumes are modest. This research explores a phasing scheme in which right turns have their own phase and bike and pedestrian crossings run in...

Actuated traffic signal control logic has many advantages because of its responsiveness to traffic demands, short cycles, effective use of capacity leading to and recovering from oversaturation, and amenability to aggressive transit priority. Its main drawback has been its inability to provide good progression along arterials. However, the traditio...

Decentralized, actuated traffic signal control has many advantages, but it lacks mechanisms for coordinating with other signals along an arterial. When an intersection along an arterial is near or at oversaturation, coordination can play an important role in preserving and utilizing capacity by preventing spillback and starvation. Rules that can be...

Actuated traffic signal control logic has many advantages because of its responsiveness to traffic demands, short cycles, effective use of capacity leading to and recovering from oversaturation, and amenability to aggressive transit priority. Its main drawback has been its inability to provide good progression along arterials. However, the traditio...

Decentralized, actuated traffic signal control has many advantages, but it lacks mechanisms for coordinating with other signals along an arterial. When an intersection along an arterial is near or at oversaturation, coordination can play an important role in preserving and utilizing capacity by preventing spillback and starvation. Rules that can be...

The efficiency of actuated signals depends on quick detection when the queue has discharged and flow rate has dropped below the saturation rate. The traditional detection method is to measure headway between successive vehicles. In single-lane approaches, this measurement works well because the safety need for longitudinal spacing during saturation...

A discrete model of bus stop location in which candidate stops are either selected or not has several practical advantages over classical continuum models. An evaluation method for stop sets that uses parcels as units of demand and the street network to model walking paths between transit stops and parcels has been proved effective and realistic. I...

Compared with the ring-barrier framework used for ring structures (or phasing plans) in signalized control of intersections in the United States, the Dutch framework has no explicit barriers, but only a requirement to respect pairwise conflicts. This paper describes how ring structures can be modeled with pairwise conflicts as a starting point. Mod...

Background/Question/Methods Urban Metabolism - the transport and transformation of matter and energy in cities - is a conceptual framework by which we are investigating coupling of human and natural systems in metropolitan Boston, from its urban core to rural hinterlands. Within this framework, our exploratory research analyzes carbon as a central...

Most individuals prefer bicycling separated from motor traffic. However, cycle tracks (physically separated bicycle-exclusive paths along roads, as found in The Netherlands) are discouraged in the USA by engineering guidance that suggests that facilities such as cycle tracks are more dangerous than the street. The objective of this study conducted...

Near major bus terminals, multiple bus arrivals per signal cycle and a convergence of buses from conflicting directions can make it impractical to apply signal priority logic that attempts to interrupt the signal cycle for each bus. This research explores signal control logic for reducing bus delay around a major bus terminal in Boston, Massachuset...

This study tests the hypothesis that marking narrower parking lanes can create additional operating space for bicyclists by inducing motorists to park closer to the curb. Parking offset (i.e., distance between the curb and a parallel parked car) was measured along two multilane urban arterials just outside Boston, Massachusetts, with parking lanes...

Time within an actuated signal cycle can be decomposed into time that is fully used, which is the saturation headway multiplied by the number of passing vehicles, and time that is wasted or lost. Activity network modeling is used to show the interaction between signal timing events and traffic flow transitions. Seven components of generalized lost...

Transit signal priority can improve bus operations when it is applied to a route without making any changes to its route design or management; however, benefits can be greater if service design and management policies are purposely altered to take advantage of transit signal priority. Service design issues include generating carefully constructed s...

Transfers cost effort and take time. They reduce the attractiveness and the competitiveness of public transportation. The impedance of transferring should be limited, especially when low-frequency routes are involved. First, this paper shows the effects of planning the offset between the timetable arrival time of the feeder line and the timetable d...

Holding buses to scheduled departure time at timepoints involves a tradeoff between reliability and speed, with impacts on user and operating cost. Two new measures of user cost, excess waiting time and potential travel time, are proposed. They relate to the early extreme of a bus’s departure time distribution from a passenger’s origin stop, and th...

To improve reliability, transit routes have time points at which early vehicles are held. Holding reduces waiting time and the amount of time passengers have to budget for a trip. However, it also reduces operating speed and thus increases passenger riding time and, potentially, operating cost. A new approach is presented for quantifying the user c...

Geographic databases and computing tools present an opportunity for improved analysis of bus stop location or spacing changes. Changes in stop location affect walking, riding, and operating cost; of these, the impact on walking is the most important and complex. Traditional models and design rules for stop spacing do not model the impact on walking...

Because of how important walk access is for transit travel, service changes that affect walking distance, such as route or stop relocation, call for modeling at a fine enough level to accurately reflect the often arbitrary aspects of the access network and of demand distribution within a zone. Case studies of stop relocation in Boston and Albany de...

European public transport operators, first in Paris and then in Brussels, Belgium, have developed a framework, a standard, and certification procedures for the management of service quality. Based on Averous’s service quality cycle, this framework incorporates both customer satisfaction and performance evaluation with service standards and service...

Traditional transit service quality measures separate waiting time from service reliability and thereby underestimate the real cost of waiting and fail to evaluate the effect of unreliability on passengers. This study’s analysis of passenger behavior shows that, for short headway service, the cost of waiting involves not only the mean time spent wa...

TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Report 113: Using Archived AVL-APC Data to Improve Transit Performance and Management explores the effective collection and use of archived automatic vehicle location (AVL) and automatic passenger counter (APC) data to improve the performance and management of transit systems. Spreadsheet files are...

One of the factors affecting where bus stops should be located is the expected delay associated with the stop location. On hills, the effect of gravity on already weak diesel engines can lead to considerable additional delay if a bus has to accelerate from a stop. An empirical bus acceleration profile, modified to account for gravity, was applied t...

One of the factors affecting where bus stops should be located is the expected delay associated with the stop location. On hills, the effect of gravity on already weak diesel engines can lead to considerable additional delay if a bus has to accelerate from a stop. An empirical bus acceleration profile, modified to account for gravity, was applied t...

Traditional transit service quality measures separate waiting time from service reliability and thereby underestimate the real cost of waiting and fail to evaluate the effect of unreliability on passengers. This study's analysis of passenger behavior shows that, for short headway service, the cost of waiting involves not only the mean time spent wa...

European public transport operators, first in Paris and then in Brussels, Belgium, have developed a framework, a standard, and certification procedures for the management of service quality. Based on Averous's service quality cycle, this framework incorporates both customer satisfaction and performance evaluation with service standards and service...

Because of how important walk access is for transit travel, service changes that affect walking distance such as route or stop relocation call for modeling at a fine enough level to accurately reflect varying development intensity, location of major attractors, and arbitrary aspects of the access network. We demonstrate the feasibility of modeling...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil Engineering, 1981. MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. Includes bibliographical references. by Peter Gregory Furth. Ph.D.

Although automatic passenger counters (APCs) have been used for many years, significant obstacles have hindered their becoming a mainstream source of data for monitoring ridership and peak load, estimating passenger miles, and other measures of passenger use important for transit management. The key to APC usefulness is the automatic, routine conve...

Most U.S. bus systems conduct on-off counts on a sample of vehicle-trips to estimate annual passengermiles, which must be submitted to the National Transit Database. The required sample size depends on the techniques used. This paper reviews alternative methods, including simple random sampling, ratio estimation with a variety of possible auxiliary...

Although automatic passenger counters (APCs) have been used for many years, significant obstacles have hindered their becoming a mainstream source of data for monitoring ridership and peak load, estimating passenger miles, and other measures of passenger use important for transit management. The key to APC usefulness is the automatic, routine conve...

At signalized intersections the red clearance interval has to be long enough to prevent accidents but not longer than necessary to ensure efficient traffic operations and encourage respect for the red indication. Because designers used a variety of methods to calculate clearance times, the association of Dutch traffic control engineers (Contactgroe...

Automatic vehicle location (AVL) and other automated data collection systems can provide a rich and extensive database that can be analyzed to improve transit management and performance. In the past, many such systems have failed to provide a good data archive, while others have had success. Through the use of an extensive survey and in-depth case...

At signalized intersections the red clearance interval has to be long enough to prevent accidents but not longer than necessary to ensure efficient traffic operations and encourage respect for the red indication. Because designers used a variety of methods to calculate clearance times, the association of Dutch traffic control engineers (Contactgroe...

This research developed and tested the concept of advanced detection and cycle length adaptation as a strategy for providing priority for transit vehicles. In a departure from control strategies that rely on detection only a few seconds in advance of the stopline, a control algorithm was developed in which transit vehicles are detected two to three...

A traffic control strategy was designed explicitly to accommodate bus priority on Avenida Ponce de Leon between Old San Juan and the northern terminus of the metro, Tren Urbano, now under construction in Puerto Rico. Up to 36 buses operate per hour in mixed traffic northbound and in an exclusive contraflow lane southbound. The control strategy is c...

Integrating an electronic farebox with a location system can provide location-stamped records of passenger boardings, a valuable source of information on passenger travel patterns. However, this information is of small value unless the pattern of passenger alightings can also be determined, since most relevant measures of interest--passenger loads,...

A trip time analyzer is a system for the offline gathering and analysis of transit operations data. The analyzer consists of a location system; an onboard computer that logs events such as doors opening and closing, stamping each event with time and location data; software that interprets the event logs to reconstruct vehicle trajectories; and a da...

A discrete approach was used to model the impacts of changing bus-stop spacing on a bus route. Among the impacts were delays to through riders, increased operating cost because of stopping delays, and shorter walking times perpendicular to the route. Every intersection along the route was treated as a candidate stop location. A simple geographic mo...

Conditional priority for buses at signalized intersections means that late buses are given priority and early buses are not. This scheme is a method of operational control that improves service quality by keeping buses on schedule. A conditional bus priority implementation in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, is described. Results show the strong improve...

Estimating passenger-kilometers or passenger-miles to meet National Transit Database requirements usually involves costly sampling. Three innovative sampling plans are described that have been developed to reduce sampling requirements. The first method, which proved to be very effective when total boardings is known, uses a small number of ride che...

The data that a farebox-based system can provide - boardings by route, direction, time of day, trip, stop, and fare category for day of the year - can be of immense value for planning, scheduling, marketing, and operations monitoring. For the most part, boarding information is being captured by an electronic device (the farebox), but for various re...

The data that a farebox-based system can provide—boardings by route, direction, time of day, trip, stop, and fare category for day of the year—can be of immense value for planning, scheduling, marketing, and operations monitoring. For the most part, boarding information is being captured by an electronic device (the farebox), but for various reason...

The challenges and current practice in ridership estimation on light rail lines, particularly barrier-free lines, are reviewed. Two-stage sampling is an efficient plan because of the high level of accuracy demanded and the small number of scheduled trips. The theory of two-stage sampling is reviewed, and modifications are derived for times when the...

Traffic and Highway Engineering, by Nicholas Garber and Lester Hoel, West Publishing Company, St. Paul., Minn., 1988, 959 pp—reviewed by A. Essam Radwan. The Spatial Impact of Technological Change, edited by John F. Brotchie, Peter Hall and Peter W. Newton, Croom Helm, London, 1987—reviewed by Dr. Kenneth Button. Public Regulation: New Perspectives...

Because many passenger demands can be met by a trip following either a full-length or short-turn pattern, schedule coordination between the patterns is essential. Possible schedule coordination modes are described. Algorithms are presented for finding the schedule offset between the patterns that will balance loads and minimize overall cost. It is...

Monitoring Passenger use measures such as boarding, revenue, passenger-miles, and load can be an expensive task for transit systems. One way to reduce data collection costs is to measure only one of these items, the auxiliary item, and then apply multiplicative factors that are estimated from a small joint sample to its estimated mean to estimate t...

In “zonal express service,” a transit corridor is divided into zones. Each inbound zonal express route picks up passengers in its zone only, then runs express to the CBD; outbound routes do the opposite. In “zonal local service,” on the other hand, an inbound vehicle will stop between its service zone and the CBD to allow passengers to alight, but...

The accuracy of route origin-destination estimates generated from boarding-alighting data was tested against actual origin-destination data. The estimates of trip length distributions and origin-destination matrices did not statistically differ from the actual data in tests of both simple and complex (branching) bus lines. While a note of caution w...

The benefits of pooling vehicles among routes that emanate from a common focus terminal are examined. In this strategy, trips are still scheduled, but vehicles are not assigned to specific trips. Instead, vehicles belonging to the pool serve all of the round trips leaving that terminal in a first in/first out sequence. Pooling improves schedule adh...

'Alternating deadheading' is described as an operating strategy for urban bus routes that have a directional imbalance in passenger demand in which some of the vehicles operating on a route deadhead (return empty) in the reverse direction while others return in service. By reducing average cycle time, deadheading can reduce the number of buses need...

Efficient routing and scheduling strategies for heavy-demand corridors are described. Examples are given. Four strategies pertain to local service: short-turning, restricted zonal service, semirestricted zonal service, and limited-stop zonal service. Zoning of express services and deadheading of both local and express service are also discussed. Ad...

Current practical and theoretical approaches to bus route problem are reviewed and a new model for setting frequencies is developed. The model allocates the available buses between time periods and between routes so as to maximize net social benefits subject to constraints on total subsidy, fleet size, and levels of vehicle loading. An algorithm is...

This synthesis will be of interest to transit agency managers, their schedule and operations planning staff, and others who are responsible for information about system operations and ridership. It will also be of interest to others who interact with transit agencies in the reporting of operations data in order to support regular scheduling and ope...