Optimizing bus stop locations for walking access: Stops-first design of a feeder route to enhance a residential plan

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (7) ◽  
pp. 1237-1259 ◽  
Author(s):  
John HE Taplin ◽  
Yuchao Sun

Feeder buses provide a small but important part of the public transport system by carrying people between residential areas and transport interchanges. A feeder bus to a train station planned in advance will attract new residents of a housing development to use the bus. The bus route can influence the location choice of a buyer concerned about access for children, the elderly or anyone not wishing to drive a car. Our bus route modelling starts with the bus stops – not the route – to be reached from each dwelling by the shortest possible walk. In demand terms, people locating close to bus stops are more likely to use the service than those choosing more distant locations, and the nearby residences have higher values. The stops-first application determines a feeder bus route to enhance an irregular residential plan covering an area of one square kilometre. The planned road and housing lot locations provide the data for calculating the access measure from each dwelling to each potential bus stop, the closest stop being used. A genetic algorithm tests potential bus stops to find demand maximizing locations, the propensity to use the bus being formulated as an exponential (increasing elasticity) function of walking distance. Then a ‘travelling salesman’ genetic algorithm finds the shortest route linking the stops, so that an efficient circuit route is generated for each alternative number of bus stops, ranging from 7 to 11. More stops not only give better access but also increase the route length, so that total accessibility must be assessed against route length. The distribution of walking distances shows most between 150 and 240 metres, with none more than 400 metres. The results indicate that planning policy should require prior design of a bus route to achieve good walking accessibility, so that residents become accustomed to the convenience of using the bus. This study shows that, at the planning stage, estimating a bi-objective model giving a Pareto front between accessibility and route length can reveal a policy compromise that shortens the route with little reduction in expected patronage.

Mathematics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 1214
Author(s):  
Herminia I. Calvete ◽  
Carmen Galé ◽  
José A. Iranzo ◽  
Paolo Toth

This paper addresses the school bus routing problem with bus stop selection, which jointly handles the problems of determining the set of bus stops to visit, allocating each student to one of these bus stops and computing the routes that visit the selected bus stops, so that the total routing cost is minimized and the walking distance of the students is limited by a given value. A fast and efficient matheuristic is developed based on an innovative approach that first partially allocates the students to a set of active stops that they can reach, and computes a set of routes that minimizes the routing cost. Then, a refining process is performed to complete the allocation and to adapt the routes until a feasible solution is obtained. The algorithm is tested on a set of benchmark instances. The computational results show the efficiency of the algorithm in terms of the quality of the solutions yielded and the computing time.


Symmetry ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 514
Author(s):  
Xiaole Guo ◽  
Rui Song ◽  
Shiwei He ◽  
Sijia Hao ◽  
Lijie Zheng ◽  
...  

The quality of route design can greatly affect the operational efficiency of feeder bus service for high-speed rail stations. A bi-objective optimization formulation is established to consider the trade-off between two conflicting optimization objectives, namely maximizing the travel demand that can be served and minimizing the feeder bus route length. The Pareto optimal solutions of the discrete mathematical formulation are generated by the exact ε-constraint method. We test the proposed approach with a numerical example on an actual size scale. The results indicate that the computational efficiency of the solution approach is encouraging, and a series of route design plans and location stop plans are generated simultaneously in a short time. A numerical example also shows that as the passengers’ maximum acceptable walking distance increases, more travel demand can be served when the route length does not change much. Benefits brought by increasing feeder bus route length are analyzed and the robustness of obtained solutions is verified. The comparison of our approach and an existing approach is also presented to demonstrate that our approach can generate better solutions.


Author(s):  
Chao Wang ◽  
Weijie Chen ◽  
Yueru Xu ◽  
Zhirui Ye

For bus service quality and line capacity, one critical influencing factor is bus stop capacity. This paper proposes a bus capacity estimation method incorporating diffusion approximation and queuing theory for individual bus stops. A concurrent queuing system between public transportation vehicles and passengers can be used to describe the scenario of a bus stop. For most of the queuing systems, the explicit distributions of basic characteristics (e.g., waiting time, queue length, and busy period) are difficult to obtain. Therefore, the diffusion approximation method was introduced to deal with this theoretical gap in this study. In this method, a continuous diffusion process was applied to estimate the discrete queuing process. The proposed model was validated using relevant data from seven bus stops. As a comparison, two common methods— Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) formula and M/M/S queuing model (i.e., Poisson arrivals, exponential distribution for bus service time, and S number of berths)—were used to estimate the capacity of the bus stop. The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of the diffusion approximation method is 7.12%, while the MAPEs of the HCM method and M/M/S queuing model are 16.53% and 10.23%, respectively. Therefore, the proposed model is more accurate and reliable than the others. In addition, the influences of traffic intensity, bus arrival rate, coefficient of variation of bus arrival headway, service time, coefficient of variation of service time, and the number of bus berths on the capacity of bus stops are explored by sensitivity analyses.


Author(s):  
Sean O'Sullivan ◽  
John Morrall

A quantifiable basis for developing design guidelines for pedestrian access to light-rail transit (LRT) stations is provided for planners based on observations in Calgary, Canada. Calgary's LRT system, which began operations in 1981, has been operating for long enough for walking patterns to and from its stations to become established. Interviews were conducted with 1,800 peak-hour LRT users about the origins and destinations of their LRT trips. Those who walked to or from a station were asked to point out on a map their approximate origins or destinations. The distances were then measured off the maps. Walking distance guidelines were developed for central business district (CBD), transfer and local stations. Catchment area maps were produced, and the relationship between reported walking time and measured walking distance was calculated. Also compared are the walking distances at LRT stations and the walking distances at bus stops. The research strongly indicates that people walk farther to reach an LRT station than a bus stop. Using bus walking standards would result in an underestimate of LRT walking distances by about half. For the city of Calgary the average walking distance to suburban stations is 649 m with a 75th-percentile distance of 840 m. At CBD stations the average walking distance is 326 m and the 75th-percentile distance is 419 m.


Nutrients ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 1192
Author(s):  
Donna Huang ◽  
Amanda Brien ◽  
Lima Omari ◽  
Angela Culpin ◽  
Melody Smith ◽  
...  

Children rarely understand the full extent of the persuasive purpose of advertising on their eating behaviours. Addressing the obesogenic environments in which children live, through a quantification of outdoor advertising, is essential in informing policy changes and enforcing stricter regulations. This research explores the proportion of bus stop advertisements promoting non-core food and beverages within walking distance (500 m) from schools in Auckland, New Zealand while using Google Street View. Information was collected on: school type, decile, address, Walk Score®, and Transit Score for all 573 schools in the Auckland region. Ground-truthing was conducted on 10% of schools and showed an alignment of 87.8%. The majority of advertisements on bus shelters were for non-food items or services (n = 541, 64.3%). Of the advertisements that were for food and/or beverages, the majority were for non-core foods (n = 108, 50.2%). There was no statistically significant difference between the variables core and non-core food and beverages and School decile (tertiles), Walk Score (quintiles), and Transit Score (quintiles). 12.8% of all bus stop advertisements in this study promoted non-core dietary options; highlighting an opportunity for implementing stricter regulations and policies preventing advertising unhealthy food and drink to children in New Zealand.


2012 ◽  
Vol 253-255 ◽  
pp. 1776-1781
Author(s):  
Wen Hua Jiang ◽  
Xian Xiang Wang ◽  
Hang Fei Lin

Starting from several aspects of site location, site size and site layout, this document studies the urban bus stop systematically, proposes the setting principles of urban bus stop. Take Yiwu bus stops for example, which focus on the analysis of the reasonable setting of the sites, and has provided guidance for the layout of urban bus stop.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (A) ◽  
pp. 230-233
Author(s):  
Gusbakti Rusip ◽  
Sri Mukti Suhartini

BACKGROUND: Sedentary lifestyle in the elderly decreases the function of cardiovascular system may lead reduction performance. Many previous studies reported that moderate intensity aerobic exercise was recommended for older persons because it may increases reactive oxygen species (ROS) at optimum level. The increasing of ROS can activate antioxidant mechanism against oxidatif stress due to exercise. AIM: The aim of this study was to investigate the change of glutathione peroxidase (GPx) activity and VO2max on moderate intensity aerobic exercise and its correlation. METHODS: The study design was quasi-experimental. Subjects were sedentary elderly women age 65 ± 5.06 years old. Total subject was 73 persons selected by consecutive sampling. Subjects did moderate intensity aerobic exercise for 12 weeks by walking for 30 min a day, 3 times a week at 50–85% of maximum heart rate. The parameters were measured on the baseline and 12 weeks after exercise. GPx activity from the plasma was examined by ELISA and the VO2max was measured by 6-min walking distance. The data were analyzed by unpaired t-test and Spearman test. RESULTS: GPx activity and VO2max were significantly increased about 41.75% and 24.11% (p < 0.05) on the experimental group, respectively. There was a correlation between GPx activity and VO2max (r = 0.223, p = 0.041). CONCLUSION: Regular moderate intensity aerobic exercise significantly increased GPx activity and VO2max. This kind of exercise is advised for the elderly because it can elevate antioxidant level as a defense against oxidative stress due to aging; therefore, it can improve aerobic capacity in the elderly.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloe Aida Lim Jhin Lin ◽  
Zakiah Ponrahono

The planning and development of rail services require various considerations. Land availability, land use, catchment, route matching, infrastructure fitting, barrier free and micro-climate friendly designs are some of the factors heeded prior to such installations. A deviation between designated and highly demanded service area in urban sprawl zones of the city has been occurring in many Malaysian cities. These gaps have led to the mismatch between origin/destination of passengers and planned locations of train stations and its feeder bus stops. As such, rail services become less accessible to populations with the highest demands. This paper discusses the preliminary findings from a pilot study which seeks to calibrate the research instrument and validate preliminary findings before actual data collection for the purpose of determining the service catchment of the T461 feeder bus in Kajang MRT Station. The Garmin GPS device acts as the research instrument to obtain coordinates of locations where passengers board and alight feeder buses. On-board surveys and comparison analyses are methods that have been used to obtain the optimum GPS coordinates of the bus stop locations. The preliminary findings indicate that the research instrument is ready to be used for actual data collection and geospatial analysis to determine the service catchment of the T461 feeder bus service.


Author(s):  
Sugiarto Sugiarto ◽  
Heru Fahlevi ◽  
Ashfa Achmad ◽  
Lia Fajri ◽  
Tomio Miwa

Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) is a common approach usually applied in examining public satisfaction and has been adopted in the transportation sector to measure the quality of service provided by the public transport system. This study, therefore, investigated the relative important service quality attributes of bus systems among both public and private modes of transportation users in Banda Aceh in Indonesia. An urban bus system known as the “Trans Koetardja” was used as a case study and a questionnaire designed based on preference survey was applied. A total of 200 samples comprising of 100 bus users and 100 private mode users including cars and motorcycles were used for the preliminary study. Moreover, the IPA approach was used to evaluate the Trans Koetaradja service quality attributes based on importance and performance classification. The quadrant grid plot showed the need for the operators to allocate their resources towards improving their services by considering (a) an improvement in bus stop facilities, (b) enhancement in the route and accurate timetable, and (c) shortening bus travel time and waiting time in the bus stop.


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