This paper proposes a kinematic wave‐based adaptive transit signal priority control (KATC) aiming to minimize average passenger delay at intersection level. The passenger delay minimization problem is formulated as a mixed‐integer non‐linear program (MINLP) with two decision variables of green time and phase sequence. The adoption of the phase sequence in the optimization and not involving the common simplifying assumptions in the delay models are the main contributions of the current study. General traffic and public transportation (PT) vehicle delay are estimated using kinematic wave theory. Genetic algorithm is utilized to solve the MINLP problem at 1‐cycle intervals and for a decision horizon of 3 consecutive cycles. The performance of KATC is evaluated against SYNCHRO and the KATC model without phase sequence optimization, using VISSIM. The results of the experiments indicate superior performance of KATC over the two other models in terms of both average passenger delay and PT passenger delay, especially at low congestion levels. Furthermore, increasing PT passenger occupancy can effectively contribute to higher passenger delay improvements. The adverse impacts on passenger vehicles are restricted to a 3.4% and 2.7% increase in general traffic delay compared to SYNCHRO and the KATC model without phase sequence optimization, respectively.