Towards appropriate BRT station design from a pedestrian spatial utility perspective

Abstract

Paper presented at the 33rd Annual Southern African Transport Conference 7-10 July 2014 "Leading Transport into the Future", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.

In this paper, guidance towards the quantitative assessment of pedestrian spatial requirements within Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) stations is proposed. Currently, little quantitative guidance is offered regarding the internal design and spatial arrangements within BRT stations; and without guidance, engineers resort to rely upon macroscopic calculations based on average passenger demand to calculate spatial requirements. This paper provides methodologies to assess BRT station pedestrian requirements in terms of corridor, turnstile and platform operations using case study assessments recently undertaken for the eThekweni and Msunduzi Municipal IRPTN1 projects. Guidance is also offered regarding “run-off” length requirements between the turnstile battery and the ticket kiosk (within the typical BRT station typology as adopted throughout major South African cities). An investigation into the sensitivity of undertaking the BRT station spatial assessments through microscopic2 simulation techniques (using VISSIM3) is also compared against the results achieved using standard macroscopic4 methods. The paper provides a greater awareness of the design considerations within industry and offers quantitative guidance towards providing appropriate spatial requirements within the generic BRT Station typology as evaluated in terms of required pedestrian Level-of- Service (LOS) criteria.