Bus bunching is a typical phenomenon observed in daily public transit operations and that significantly reduces the reliability and attractiveness of transit service. Although various control strategies, such as vehicle holding, speed guidance, and signal priority, have been proposed to eliminate or alleviate bus bunching, the impact of road traffic flow on bus bunching has not been well studied. To bridge this gap, this work proposes a new mesoscopic simulation model by incorporating the lattice Boltzmann model to simulate bus bunching considering the impacts of road traffic flow. Simulation results show that by utilizing the new simulation model, different phase diagrams can be observed. Under different conditions of traffic flow-density evolution, i.e., no oscillation, single oscillation, global oscillation, and irregular oscillation, the resulting bus trajectories are significantly different. In addition, an investigation of a real-world bus line in Beijing with global positioning system (GPS)-based vehicle location data shows that some results of the model are qualitatively consistent with the actual characteristics of the bus route. It shows that the proposed new simulation model has great potential for enhancing our understanding of the impacts of road traffic flow on bus bunching.
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