Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) and the city of Boston have partnered to improve transit reliability and travel times by upgrading Boston’s Traffic Management Center.
The center features software that integrates MBTA bus locations into real-time traffic signal adjustments. The upgrade will reduce the wait times at red lights in signalized intersections. Currently as many as half of transit delay involved the intersections.
The software was deployed in July and is being tested for one year at three intersections on Brighton Avenue with the goal of improving the 57 and 66 bus routes. The routes have a combined 15,000 riders daily.
“The MBTA has great municipal partners who continue to collaborate with us on improving bus services, and we’re grateful to the city of Boston for building on the success of the 2019 Brighton Avenue bus lane project to add Transit Signal Priority to the bus lane corridor,” Phillip Eng, MBTA general manager and CEO, said. “This will add to the reliability benefits already felt by riders on Routes 57 and 66 every day, improve bus service for the community, and bring riders to their destinations more quickly.”
The MBTA and the city of Boston have been working with the traffic signal vendor to make the software more flexible in signal timing.