Bus lane safety implications: a case study in Hong Kong

Abstract

Bus lanes have been widely adopted in major cities such as Hong Kong to improve the efficiency of bus services and increase bus modal share. However, their impacts on road safety have been overlooked. This study employs two observational before–after study techniques aiming to examine whether accident occurrences of the roads equipped with bus lanes had been changed thereafter. On the seven studied sites, decrease in public bus accidents, both fatal and serious (FS) and fatal, serious and slight (FSS) were found; but, increase in other vehicle FS accident were found. Albeit only two of the decreases and neither of the increases were statistically significant at the 5% level, the results appear to suggest that only public buses have benefited in terms of road safety from the bus lane operation. Further investigation into the impacts on non-bus traffic is thus required to provide an insight for future bus lane planning regarding safety.

Keywords:

• before-after study
• bus lane
• road safety
• public bus

Acknowledgements

The work described in this article is supported by a studentship granted by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The authors would like to thank the reviewers’ constructive comments to earlier drafts of this article.