About the Transit Priority Atlas

The Transit Priority Atlas is a research project that aims to advance the conversation on transit priority policies and broaden the practical knowledge of decision-makers, transit professionals, and advocates about the surprisingly varied tools and strategies they can leverage to improve the performance of street-running transit in their cities. The lack of well-documented, thoroughly explained, and easily accessible examples of real-world implementations of transit priority measures across jurisdictions is often a major drag on local innovation, as priority policies are constrained by local knowledge and embedded in implicit, unchallenged assumptions about traffic management.

There is abundant literature on transit priority. However, this topic is often discussed in overly technical, highly specialized jargon that prevents interdisciplinary understanding and informed political decision-making, while academic research focuses on very specific, often technology-heavy subtopics, such as signal priority optimization or the use of AI for traffic management, on before/after data-driven studies, or delivers broader descriptive narratives of policies and case studies that sometimes lack the necessary details for a successful replication through learning and adaptation. Existing design-oriented tools, such as NACTO’s Transit Street Design Guide, lack an international perspective and neglect non-conventional approaches and the broader traffic management context in which a particular transit priority tool operates, focusing instead on street design within the narrower corridor.

By providing a rich, scalable compendium of real-world use cases and in-depth case studies that can be browsed from the perspective of the tools and strategies they employ, the Transit Priority Atlas aims to serve as a living platform for the diffusion of transferable, replicable knowledge across broader geographic and disciplinary contexts.

Why an Atlas?

Why a Transit Priority ATLAS? We believe that transit priority is a policy problem that could be better understood by both topic specialists and adjacent-field generalists through the visually rich format of a commented Atlas. Mapping traffic circulation arrangements and building a growing database of specific use cases are essential to developing a better understanding of how specific transit priority tools can work. The functional aspects of these “transit-in-traffic” arrangements are better explained through maps, charts, and diagrams than words. Transit priority is a spatial problem that plays out at different scales and mobilizes different design tools to devise strategies, from street space allocation in cross-section to intersection geometric design in plan, from the functional organization of traffic at the scale of a single intersection, to the broader organization of circulation patterns at the neighbourhood, and even the broader city level.

Who

This research was developed by the Transit Cost Project Team at the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University, with invaluable contributions from researchers and practitioners from other institutions.

Marco Chitti (NYU - Marron) is the lead researcher and developed the research idea, the study cases, and the website design. Can Sucuoglu (Studio 2263) conducted the data analysis of surface transit performances (the ‘Journey’ section of the website), contributed to developing the architecture of the GIS database for transit lanes and the website development. Eric Goldwyn (NYU - Marron) provided constant guidance, feedback, and much-needed support with writing and proofreading. Franklin Tang (NYU - Marron) helped compile the database of boarding policies. Ismail Rashad (NYU) compiled the GIS database of transit lanes for U.S. and Canadian cities. Markus Lagler (TU Wien) compiled the GIS database for Austrian cities. Paolo Beria, Elettra Anna Carapacchi, Alexei Yakushin, and Sofia Salvoni compiled the GIS database for Italian cities.

We would also like to thank all the people who helped us throughout this research with suggestions, insights, information, and their precious experience on the topic.