Transit Signal Priority (TSP) is a powerful tool for enhancing the speed and reliability of transit service. It is particularly valuable for bus rapid transit (BRT) and high-frequency transit along busy streets, where traffic signals can cause significant delays. Newly available technology for cloud-based operations of TSP systems, combined with post-pandemic travel changes, have made TSP an increasingly popular mechanism for transit agencies to provide reliable service.

At Swiftly, our mission is to help cities move more efficiently—and TSP is one of the best tools in an agency’s tool chest to accomplish this. Swiftly’s Transit Data Platform enables the adoption and success of TSP programs in multiple ways, from planning to implementation to ongoing operation.

Based on this experience, we’ve identified common challenges for agencies rolling out the latest generation of TSP technology, including:

• Identifying the most critical locations for TSP implementation
• Deploying TSP systems without any new hardware using real-time APIs
• Evaluating the effectiveness of TSP projects

Read on for guidance on how agencies can overcome these challenges to ensure success with the full lifecycle of a TSP project.

Identifying the locations for TSP

Agencies need to pinpoint locations where TSP will have the greatest impact—typically at signalized intersections where vehicles experience consistent delays, service is unreliable, and ridership is high.

However, identifying these locations can be challenging. Collecting and analyzing ridership, delay, and reliability data is often time-consuming and complex. Additionally, many legacy technologies offer low-fidelity data, providing only broad metrics like stop-to-stop travel times and overall reliability.

Having access to easily accessible reports with detailed service performance data allows a transit agency to pinpoint the most impactful corridors for TSP projects.

How Swiftly can help

Swiftly’s Run-Times and Speed Map products each provide windows into the historical record of transit service and where it might be improved with TSP.

Run-Times allow agencies to easily identify routes with poor schedule adherence or extreme run-time variability. The Run-Times Analysis View provides a deep understanding of how routes are performing in accordance with their scheduled run-times, including visualizations indicating the variability of observed run-times to help identify locations for speed and reliability improvements.

Swiftly customers have used Run-Times to plan TSP projects and measure their impact. For example, the Maryland Department of Transportation and Maryland Transit Administration (MDOT MTA) used Run-Times to identify priority routes for TSP and measure up to 20% improvements in speeds after deployment.

Speed Map easily surfaces where transit is habitually slowed down and visualizes that at a very granular level of just 25-meter roadway segments. For example, when Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA)’s ambitious $230-million plan for thirty-four miles of dedicated bus lanes with TSP was facing barriers, they used Swiftly Speed Map to identify bite-sized TSP and stop consolidation projects to attack the same goals at a fraction of the cost.

Deploying TSP without installing new hardware

Historically, TSP has been architected predominantly with bespoke hardware systems that communicate a signal directly from the bus to the traffic signal. This requires a matching set of hardware for every vehicle and signal. The results are long deployment timelines, inflexible technology, and significant capital and maintenance costs.

Over the past few years, a more forward-thinking architecture has emerged whereby the signals are controlled via a cloud-native software system leveraging existing hardware. This is made possible by two exciting developments. First, almost half of all major intersections in the USA are now connected to the internet and controllable without introducing new hardware. Second, cloud-based software systems can now leverage existing onboard hardware such as wifi routers to track vehicles and communicate to the internet. These two collectively provide an opportunity for a cloud-based software solution to intelligently determine if/when to send a priority request to the signal.

How Swiftly can help

Swiftly’s Transit Data Platform offers the industry’s best source of truth for where transit vehicles are, have been, and will be next. Agencies have historically relied on Swiftly for passenger information, operational management, and historical insights. Today, Swiftly is increasingly also serving as a critical software system to provide the robust real-time data source necessary to power TSP systems.

By combining the ultra-fast location reporting rate of modern wifi routers (often sharing vehicle location every 1–5 seconds) with our best-in-class systems for determining a vehicle’s current operational status, Swiftly publishes a single, continuous source-of-truth data feed with everything that TSP companies need. From our API, the TSP system gets a one-stop shop for the current location, heading, speed, route assignment, layover status, on-time performance, bunching or gapping status, and occupancy of a vehicle. ThruGreen, a provider of cloud-based TSP services, shared:

“It's the closest thing to a plug-and-play data source for transit vehicles.”

With this information, a TSP system can, without deploying any new hardware on vehicles, determine exactly if and when to request signal priority. As a result, Swiftly has become a go-to option for TSP deployments around the country, with several different TSP software providers—including Miovision Opticom, LYT, ThruGreen, Kimley-Horn, and many more—having successfully launched systems using Swiftly data with more than a dozen transit agencies.

Here’s what Dustin Harber, CTO at LYT had to say:

“Mobility solutions rely on knowing where vehicles are and where they're headed. To optimize traffic flow in real-time, we need fast, reliable data from vehicles on the road. Swiftly provides exactly that: high-quality, real-time transit data in an easy-to-use format—helping LYT deliver top-tier transit signal priority performance.”

Evaluating TSP projects

Evaluating success is both a requirement of every TSP project and a historically time-consuming process.

Transit agencies want to assess the efficacy of TSP solutions at multiple phases of an implementation:

• During a TSP pilot on a few routes or intersections, to confirm that TSP could provide the promised benefits to inform decision-making for a systemwide deployment
• As part of a competitive procurement, to select the best TSP vendor or configuration
• After a systemwide deployment, to continually monitor the continual effectiveness of TSP, and to measure the return on investment (ROI)

This assessment is usually done by agency staff or their selected consultants. Assessing TSP has been a largely labor-intensive effort that could not easily be scaled across all routes and intersections or time periods.

How Swiftly can help

Once TSP is live, agencies can hope to see decreases in travel times and then adjust schedules to match these newfound speeds. Swiftly’s Run-Times product allows users to quickly measure the improvements in transit speed and reliability as a result of TSP before and during a pilot period, and to hone in on precisely the routes and segments affected.

In Indianapolis, IndyGo is using Swiftly to analyze its second BRT line, the Purple Line, that opened for service in October 2024. IndyGo’s vendor, Kimley-Horn, was able to power this system using Swiftly data, and now, says Matt Duffy, Director of Capital Projects at IndyGo, they are “using Swiftly’s data analysis tools to inform future schedule adjustments aimed to increase route performance.”

As another example, after deploying the Miovision Opticom cloud-based TSP system with Swiftly data, Redding Area Bus Authority (RABA)’s initial analysis indicated a 15% average reduction in travel time per trip or a 3.5-hour reduction in travel time per month, says John Andoh, RABA’s Transit General Manager.

Finally, these savings in travel times will then need to be reflected in an updated schedule and reinvested into more frequent service. Swiftly’s recommended run-times can help planners and schedulers accomplish this step to unlock the full benefits of TSP.

Ensuring success at all stages of TSP projects

Accurate, accessible data and intuitive reporting tools are prerequisites for success with TSP. Swiftly is a trusted partner at all stages of TSP projects: identifying the most critical locations for deployment, implementing TSP systems, and enabling seamless TSP integration by leveraging existing hardware.

Request a meeting to learn more about how your agency or company can ensure success with an upcoming TSP project.