Development of analytical tools for evaluating operations of light-rail at-grade within an urban signal system

This research investigated the use of the Federal Highway Administration's NETwork SIMulation (NETSM program and JRH Transportation Engineering's TransSim II (tm) as a tool for agencies interested in planning and developing LRT systems. NETSIM is one of the few available traffic analysis programs with the flexibility to model the operations and mobility impacts of transit. Similarly, TransSim II (tm) can model the impacts of transit and has been specifically developed for this purpose. To evaluate NETSIM and TransSim II (tm) for simulating and providing accurate descriptive measures of performance for LRT and traffic in pretimed and actuated material networks, researchers compared outputs from the model with real-world field data from Los Angeles and Long Beach, California and Portland, Oregon. The results indicated that the models could produce moderately accurate measures of stopped delay and percent stops for individual intersections within studied networks. On a system-wide basis, the models produced reasonably reliable, accurate estimates of network travel times and were capable of reproducing most traffic characteristics observed in the field. They also performed well in simulating the control impacts and behavior of LRT in the modeled systems.