Preferential treatment for buses and trams can optimise the use of road space, particularly during periods of peak demand. However, transit priority can have impacts that are undesirable to other road users and interested parties, such as additional delay at intersections, the removal of on-street parking or the reallocation of road lanes for the exclusive use of transit.
Stakeholder actions, political influences and other factors can result in significant modifications to transit priority schemes or implementation failure. While decision making and implementation has been widely researched in public policy analysis and related fields, as yet it is unclear how these approaches might apply to transit priority implementation.
This research aims to build a new and comprehensive theory of transit priority implementation based on public policy analysis approaches. Developing a new framework for the successful development of transit priority in Melbourne is a goal of this project. The research includes case studies of transit priority implementation in Melbourne, throughout the rest of Australia and internationally.
This project is part of the Sustainable and Effective Public Transport – Graduate Research Industry Partnership (SEPT-GRIP) and was supervised by Professor Graham Currie and Professor Geoff Rose, with industry supervision from Alistair Cumming. The project was undertaken by James Reynolds and sponsored by VicRoads and Monash University.
The thesis is available online here.
