CHALLENGE
As part of Nashville’s larger Complete Streets Implementation Plan, the Nashville Metro Public Works, in coordination with the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT), Nashville Metropolitan Transit Agency, WeGo Public Transit, and through funding from USDOT began an improvement project along the Murfreesboro Pike bus transit corridor. The project called for improving strategic pedestrian connections to the bus stops and enhancing schedule reliability of the Bus Rapid Transit Lite and Local Service bus lines along the high-volume corridor.
ECONOLITE SOLUTION
In 2018, Econolite began deploying Centracs Center-to-Center and Route Priority solutions along the Murfreesboro Pike transit corridor to enhance transit service and schedule reliability with a state-of-the-art transit signal priority system. Working closely with TDOT and WeGo Public Transit, Econolite also ported EOS controller software in all of the traffic controllers throughout the corridor so that the Econolite software solutions could communicate seamlessly with the existing TransitMaster CAD/AVL geofence-based system.
Econolite accommodated adding trace file capabilities in EOS to individually log changes in the traffic controller program adjustments. As a result, the transit signal priority system is able to log every AVL checkpoint to overlay and integrate with the central TransitMaster program with zero latency. In 2021, Econolite completed the transit signal priority system along the Murfreesboro Pike corridor, combining the SCP solution along with programmed queue jump functionality for optimized transit vehicle travel times. With Econolite’s custom software development and integration, the Route Priority solution allows for continuing signal priority requests through back-to-back cycles while the coordinator logic ensures the signals stay in coordination with each other.
