الفهرس 
THEORETICAL BACKGROUNDOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
GCR, as many regions in the developing countries, suffer from many traffic congestion problems. These problems have a severe negative impact on the reliability of public transportation services, especially buses. Exclusive bus lanes provision was suggested as a solution, not only for improving the public transportation service, but also for reducing vehicular traffic congestion. Exclusive bus lanes can be a quick and a relatively cheap solution in Cairo when compared to implementing a whole BRT system. The main objective of this research is to investigate and evaluate the potential benefits of exclusive bus lane implementation on one corridor in Greater Cairo Region (GCR), July 26 Corridor, as a case study. The benefits were assessed by the amount of travel time savings and queue length reduction if a queue exists.
In the absence of exclusive bus lane installation in real life in GCR, micro-simulation was used as a tool to evaluate the potential benefits of applying exclusive bus lanes. A 9 km section of the 26th of July corridor which is a suburban expressway in GCR was selected as a case study. A VISSIM micro-simulation model of the corridor was developed and validated in order to ensure the reliability of the model before use. The author advocates using an easy-to-understand, yet
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appropriate measure of the traffic stream such as spot speed as acalibration parameter. Video data were collected for about 9 hours on the corridor for both directions and were used to obtain traffic volumes and composition. Moreover, video data were used to estimate corridor travel times by matching the vehicle passing in front of the cameras. Spot speeds were collected using a speed gun for a sample that comprised more than 2,000 vehicles belonging to different vehicle classes. Spot speeds distributions were tuned extensively in VISSIM so as to replicate the empirical distributions of the collected data. Furthermore, the distributions were developed for each vehicle type to achieve a higher level of accuracy. Statistical tests were carried out to ensure that the modeled speed distributions matched the observed distributions. Corridor travel times and maximum queue lengths were used as validation variables according to the prevailing traffic conditions (i.e. free flow or congested). Error measurements were computed and the results showed a satisfactory matching between the observed and the simulation measures.
The model was then used to evaluate various implementation scenarios of exclusive bus lanes (e.g. median and curb lanes) for both travel directions. These scenarios of the WB direction included:
1. An exclusive bus lane for CTA buses only (XL CTA).
2. An exclusive bus lane for all buses (XL All Buses).
As for the EB direction, the analyzed scenarios were:
1. CXL for CTA buses only,
2. CXL for all Buses,
3. MXL for CTA buses only,
4. MXL for all Buses, and