Simulation of Reserved Lanes Along Signalised Arterials in Urban Areas for Autonomous Buses

The integration of autonomous buses into urban public transport offers opportunities to improve service efficiency in mixed traffic. Although lane reservation strategies have been extensively investigated for conventional public transport, their application to autonomous buses operating within urban transit services remains largely unexplored. This study analyses the applicability of different lane management strategies for an autonomous bus service operating along an existing route on a major urban arterial in Turin, extending current research beyond the low-speed shuttles in controlled environments typically considered in European studies. The study investigates different lane management options for autonomous public transport in a simulated road traffic environment and evaluates the effectiveness of the process of autonomous bus detection and lane activation logic, aiming to refine control strategies. For dynamic lane reservation, a local management approach is compared with respect to an arterial-based logic to evaluate the impact of dedicated lanes for autonomous buses, aimed at reducing interactions with general traffic, while limiting side effects to private vehicles. The preliminary results demonstrate, for the simulated Turin corridor, that full-corridor dynamic reservation with the arterial activation logic reduces autonomous bus travel and stop times, while producing smaller impacts on car speed compared to a basic permanent lane reservation.