Leeds City Council needed a way to differentiate between taxis and buses on the busy A65 main arterial route into the city, to ensure bus priority without undue disruption to traffic. AGD’s 318 Traffic Control Radar provided the ideal solution.
A bus priority solution designed to detect buses as they exit the bus lane and to give them priority over other traffic needed to be modified to differentiate between buses and taxis, which were also permitted to use the bus lane. “The problem arose when taxis as well as buses were setting the signals to red,” explains Richard Tallant, Group Engineer UTMC at Leeds City Council. “Every time the bus gate demand turned the main road signals to red, there was a delay to the general traffic. That headway is a loss for us, so we need to keep it to a minimum by only having the buses creating the demand – not taxis too.
“Our existing loop-based system needed to be replaced with a profile detector that could differentiate between buses and taxis. AGD suggested its 318 Traffic Control Radar – an above-ground solution which didn’t need any slot cutting and was quick and easy to install and maintain. Now taxis can still get out of the bus lane, but they need to wait for a gap in the traffic in the normal way – they don’t get priority, and there are fewer disruptions to the traffic flow.”
Straightforward and cost-effective
The AGD 318 is ideal for differentiating road users, making priority schemes at junctions, crossings and on busways much more straightforward and cost-effective than loop-based detection. Non-intrusive, and requiring no road closures or traffic management to install or maintain, the 318 saves both time and money, and can be installed on existing traffic signal infrastructure.
Setup is easy, thanks to the wireless AGD Touch-setup with a simple, user-friendly interface that helps ensure virtual loops are positioned right first time. Using a laptop, a zone or virtual loop can be set up for single-lane detection up to 40m from the radar to look specifically for the larger radar signals returned from buses. The radar will provide a simple switched output into the road-side controller when a bus is detected, which can be used to prioritise the approach with a green phase, or extend the green phase if it is already active.
Richard and his team were very happy with the 318 Traffic Control Radar. “Because it’s pole-mounted and therefore non-intrusive, we were able to put it in and test it – quickly, cheaply and easily. If we had needed to cut loops into the road, we would have had to recover the cost. It is a lot more beneficial to have the technology above ground.”
The success of this installation has led the team to plan more bus priority measures. “It’s a very straightforward solution. We have disconnected all the loops and we just have the one detector in place, which is working really well,” says Richard. “We’re proposing to install another one soon, which will allow us to detect and differentiate a bus coming over a bridge.”