SmartBRT: A Tool for Simulating, Visualizing, and Evaluating Bus Rapid Transit Systems

Evaluation of BRT systems SmartBRT is for designed for modeling and simulating hypothetical transit systems, especially those making use of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) technologies and policies. SmartBRT can be used to evaluate new technologies and policies that haven't been fully explored in deployed systems. SmartBRT does not output emissions or cost data. SmartBRT does not calculate the longterm effects of BRT deployment, such as changes in mode choice. To aid in evaluation, SmartBRT provides features for data gathering and statistics. The model report has a complete list of variables that can be measured and aggregated. Evaluation of Transit systems SmartBRT can also be used to evaluate traditional transit system designs. Paramics and other traffic simulation tools have some ability to do this kind of work. However, SmartBRT has an advantage even in cases without any BRT elements: in situations where input data is sparse, there is a corresponding reduction in the effort to specify the system. For instance, if all signal phase structures are hypothetically the same, the same description does not need to be repeated for each signal. Visualization Simulation outputs can be used to produce 3D animations. The animated world can be edited to show recognizable landmarks based on digital photographs. However, Paramics was not designed to model vehicle movement with high precision, and so vehicle movement in the animation may not always be realistic. Applicability of Paramics We determined that Paramics has some serious limitations for use in simulating BRT. These limitations are discussed in Paramics limitations and problems, section 3.4 of the model report.