Sharing bus stops: An efficient use of public spaces

This research analyses and evaluates how bus stops are really being used in order to design a more efficient policy for sharing them between freight vehicles and buses, creating a new kind of bus stop called a ‘shared bus stop’. These bus stops will need to fulfil certain requirements in order to be used by urban buses and freight vehicles. Buses are still given priority, but freight transport vehicles will be allowed to use these areas whenever they are available by providing real time information about bus arrivals. To evaluate the use of the shared bus stops, discrete event simulations have been run in an area of the city of Santander (Spain).These simulations showed that the efficiency (occupancy time) of a bus stop space increases during the period of analysis, in some cases by up to 72%. The optimal number of delivery bays with operational shared bus stops has also been calculated and shows that the optimal number of delivery bays decreases by almost 30% due to the use of shared bus stops, meaning that this delivery bay space could be used for other purposes.