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.
