Automated enforcement of bus-only lanes and crossings with policy and implementation insights from a Calgary case study
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Proposes cost-effective framework for bus-only lane and crossing enforcement. • Combines Raspberry Pi, GPS, and LiDAR for automated violation detection. • Uses YOLOv8 and PaddleOCR for vehicle, plate, and pedestrian recognition. • Field-tested in Calgary on 18 bus lanes and one bus-only crossing corridor. • Provides policy insights for scalable, reliable transit priority enforcement. With further attention to improving public transit service quality and reliability, transit priority measures such as bus-only lanes and bus-only crossings are becoming more common. These measures are only effective if priority can be maintained for transit, and access for regular vehicles is restricted. This can be only achieved by regulating their usage and enforcing these regulations. However, enforcement measures to prevent unauthorized vehicles from using bus-only lanes and bus-only crossings have been a manual process or employed costly systems such as bus traps in many cities. Automating this enforcement process through digital technologies can lead to substantial benefits and cost savings. Nevertheless, academic and professional literature on automated enforcement of bus-only lanes and bus-only crossings using advanced image and video processing techniques is limited. In this study, we propose a framework and guidelines for these automated enforcement systems that can be implemented by any transit agency at a low cost. We outlined our framework using three components: Hardware proof of concept, software design containing an image processing model, and user interface. We used a Raspberry Pi for hardware, PaddleOCR for license plate recognition and YOLOv8 for training our model. The operation of the system was further optimized using GPS (for bus-only lanes) and LiDAR (for bus-only crossings) sensors. To assess the applicability of our framework, we tested it on several bus-only lanes and a bus-only crossing in Calgary. The results showed a cost-effective solution while providing good performance in detecting violations and identifying unauthorized vehicles and pedestrians. The observations presented in the study can provide valuable insights to any transit agency for future implementations and policy-making process of automated bus-only lanes and bus-only crossings.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it