scholarly journals OPTIMIZING LIMITED-STOP BUS SERVICES ALONG A PUBLIC TRANSIT CORRIDOR WITH A DIFFERENTIAL FARE STRUCTURE

Transport ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 476-489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chunyan Tang ◽  
Ying-En Ge ◽  
William H. K. Lam
Keyword(s):  
Social Cost ◽  
Travel Demand ◽  
Public Transit ◽  
Social Equity ◽  
Heavy Load ◽  
Transit System ◽  
Fleet Size ◽  
Bus Service ◽  
Total Social Cost ◽  
Bus Services

Limited-stop bus services are a highly efficient way to release more potential of the public transit system to meet travel demand, especially under constraints on vehicle fleet size and transportation infrastructure. This work first proposes a visualized fare table for the design of limited-stop bus services along a public transit corridor, along which many lines of public transit carry a heavy load of demand back and forth every working day. Based on this proposed fare table, a set of fare strategies and desired aims of fare policy, a differentiated fare structure is established to improve social equity and increase revenue. The nature of the structure can help travellers understand how to be charged between their origins and destinations (e.g. flat, time-based, stop-based or quality-based pricing) and then plan their trips efficiently. Secondly, a model is formulated to minimize the total social cost in designing a fixed demand limited-stop bus service system with a differentiated fare structure. Thirdly, numerical results are carried out with sensitivity analysis within three scenarios of differentiated fare structures. It is found that a differentiated fare structure has a great effect on passenger path choice behaviour and resulting optimal design of bus services. An attractive feature of this differentiated fare structure is that it could not only enhance the operator’s revenue and social equity but also reduce passenger transfers and social cost.

Frequency Optimization Models for Reducing Overcrowding Discomfort

2020 ◽  
Vol 2674 (5) ◽  
pp. 160-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kinshuk Agrawal ◽  
Hemant K. Suman ◽  
Nomesh B. Bolia
Keyword(s):  
Social Cost ◽  
Linear Models ◽  
Travel Demand ◽  
Optimum Frequency ◽  
Step Procedure ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
Frequency Optimization ◽  
Total Social Cost ◽  
Bus Services ◽  
Bus Transport

One of the most important aspects of improving public bus transport attractiveness is reducing overcrowding in buses. However, most of the mathematical models that focus on designing bus services minimize the total social cost without considering the overcrowding discomfort. Further, they are mostly non-linear in nature and use heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches. Thus, they are difficult to understand and use by practitioners. This work addresses these gaps through models that include overcrowding discomfort and are also easy to implement and contextualize by practitioners. The authors develop one non-linear and two linear models to determine the optimum frequency of buses and apply them over a network of 34 routes of Delhi. The results reveal that the existing number of buses in Delhi is not sufficient to cater to the existing travel demand of peak hours, even after their optimum allocation. The authors also present a step-by-step procedure to enable practitioners to determine the minimum additional number of buses required to reduce the target discomfort and waiting time.

scholarly journals Understanding Users’ Satisfaction Towards Public Transit System in India: A Case-Study of Mumbai

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Rahul Das
Keyword(s):  
Service Quality ◽  
Public Transport ◽  
Travel Demand ◽  
Resource Constraints ◽  
Public Transit ◽  
Sampling Bias ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Transit System ◽  
Transport Services ◽  
Developing Cities

In this work, we present a novel approach to understand the quality of public transit system in resource constrained regions using user-generated contents. With growing urban population, it is getting difficult to manage travel demand in an effective way. This problem is more prevalent in developing cities due to lack of budget and proper surveillance system. Due to resource constraints, developing cities have limited infrastructure to monitor transport services. To improve the quality and patronage of public transit system, authorities often use manual travel surveys. But manual surveys often suffer from quality issues. For example, respondents may not provide all the detailed travel information in a manual travel survey. The survey may have sampling bias. Due to close-ended design (specific questions in the questionnaire), lots of relevant information may not be captured in a manual survey process. To address these issues, we investigated if user-generated contents, for example, Twitter data, can be used to understand service quality in Greater Mumbai in India, which can complement existing manual survey process. To do this, we assumed that, if a tweet is relevant to public transport system and contains negative sentiment, then that tweet expresses user’s dissatisfaction towards the public transport service. Since most of the tweets do not have any explicit geolocation, we also presented a model that does not only extract users’ dissatisfaction towards public transit system but also retrieves the spatial context of dissatisfaction and the potential causes that affect the service quality. It is observed that a Random Forest-based model outperforms other machine learning models, while yielding 0.97 precision and 0.88 F1-score.

scholarly journals Public Transit Loyalty Modeling Considering the Effect of Passengers’ Emotional Value: A Case Study in Xiamen, China

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shi-chao Sun
Keyword(s):  
Structural Equation ◽  
Goodness Of Fit ◽  
Public Transit ◽  
Perceived Value ◽  
Index Score ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bus Service ◽  
Bus Services ◽  
Emotional Value

To better sustain passengers’ loyalty towards bus service, this paper addressed the modeling of the public transit loyalty by the use of structural equation model. As a novel hypothesis, the emotional value was considered to have effects on the perceived value of bus services in this study, which reflected the degree of passengers’ emotional dependence on the public transit. Specifically, in order to better assess the loyalty, seven unobserved variables were measured to construct the structural model, namely, “service guarantee,” “operational services and efficiency,” “emotional value,” “perceived value,” “expectation,” “satisfaction,” and “loyalty.” The goodness-of-fit of the model was estimated and evaluated by using the survey data harvested from Xiamen, China. Besides, the index score of variables was also computed to help determine targeted approaches to better improve the level of bus service. The results indicated that the time cost and the monetary cost actually had no effects on the perceived value of users in the case study. At the same time, however, it also proved that passengers’ emotional value towards the public transit indeed affected passengers’ perception of the service value. In addition, whether users’ perceived value was as expected determined how much passengers satisfied with the service. Regarding the index score of variables, it indicated a great dissatisfaction of passengers towards the current bus service. Unexpectedly, the score of loyalty even still retained a relatively high level, which reflected continue-to-use willingness of passengers. It implied that being subject to economic conditions and other factors, passengers were captive and had to continue relying on the public transit, in spite of their dissatisfaction. As for the improvement direction of bus services, targeted approaches should be determined to improve the quality of bus service, regarding the aspects of “condition of facilities in the bus,” “driving stability and comfort,” “vehicle speed,” and “safety.”

Using Deficit Function to Determine the Minimum Fleet Size of an Autonomous Modular Public Transit System

2020 ◽  
Vol 2674 (11) ◽  
pp. 532-541 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tao Liu ◽  
Avishai (Avi) Ceder ◽  
Andreas Rau
Keyword(s):  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Public Transit ◽  
Programming Model ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Single Line ◽  
Continuum Approximation ◽  
Transit System ◽  
Fleet Size ◽  
Minimum Number

Emerging technologies, such as connected and autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, and information and communication, are surrounding us at an ever-increasing pace, which, together with the concept of shared mobility, have great potential to transform existing public transit (PT) systems into far more user-oriented, system-optimal, smart, and sustainable new PT systems with increased service connectivity, synchronization, and better, more satisfactory user experiences. This work analyses such a new PT system comprised of autonomous modular PT (AMPT) vehicles. In this analysis, one of the most challenging tasks is to accurately estimate the minimum number of vehicle modules, that is, its minimum fleet size (MFS), required to perform a set of scheduled services. The solution of the MFS problem of a single-line AMPT system is based on a graphical method, adapted from the deficit function (DF) theory. The traditional DF model has been extended to accommodate the definitions of an AMPT system. Some numerical examples are provided to illustrate the mathematical formulations. The limitations of traditional continuum approximation models and the equivalence between the extended DF model and an integer programming model are also provided. The extended DF model was applied, as a case study, to a single line of an AMPT system, the dynamic autonomous road transit (DART) system in Singapore. The results show that the extended DF model is effective in solving the MFS problem and has the potential to be applied to solving real-life MFS problems of large-scale, multi-line and multi-terminal AMPT systems.

Adapting Procurement Models for Electric Buses in Latin America

2019 ◽  
Vol 2673 (10) ◽  
pp. 175-184
Author(s):  
Jone Orbea ◽  
Sebastian Castellanos ◽  
Cristina Albuquerque ◽  
Ryan Sclar ◽  
Berta Pinheiro
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Case Study Research ◽  
Transit System ◽  
Charging Infrastructure ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Bus Service ◽  
Bus Services ◽  
Fleet Deployment

Bus services are a fundamental component of transportation networks in Latin America, but buses often account for a disproportionately large number of environmental externalities. Electric buses (e-buses) are emerging as an effective and pragmatic option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and local pollutants. However, e-buses are difficult to procure in Latin America because of existing procurement challenges in the region, especially as those challenges relate to forming contracts to deal with high upfront costs and unknown risks. To overcome these procurement issues, this paper presents a new contractual model, based on literature and case study research. This new model suggests the separation of bus service responsibilities into three separate actors: multiple bus procurement companies, one or multiple bus depots and charging infrastructure companies, and multiple bus operating companies. By separating bus service responsibilities, the proposed model would bring about three concrete improvements: lower costs to the transit system, better quality of service, and lower-emission fleet deployment.

Intermodal Connection of High-Speed Rail with Interregional Bus Services in Japan

2020 ◽  
Vol 2674 (11) ◽  
pp. 674-684
Author(s):  
Ryosuke Yashiro ◽  
Hironori Kato
Keyword(s):  
Rural Areas ◽  
High Speed ◽  
Travel Demand ◽  
Choice Model ◽  
Market Potential ◽  
Intermodal Transportation ◽  
High Speed Rail ◽  
Transportation Service ◽  
Bus Service ◽  
Bus Services

An intermodal transportation service consisting of high-speed rail (HSR) and an interregional bus service is one policy option for rural areas where interregional travel demand is too low to justify the construction of HSR. This study reviews current interregional bus services connecting with interregional rail, particularly HSR, in Japan, and analyzes the market potential for improving intermodal transportation by integrating HSR with an interregional bus service. It reviews the current interregional transportation network and related travel demand, including for air, rail, and bus. It also analyzes the connectivity of rail+bus intermodal transportation. The analysis showed poor connectivity of HSR and interregional bus services in Japan. Next, an interregional travel mode choice model is estimated with a nested-logit model using data from the Interregional Travel Survey 2010. Then, origin–destination pairs constituting the potential travel demand of the rail+bus option are identified using simple market analysis. This revealed that origin–destination pairs connecting prefectural cities along the Tohoku Shinkansen (HSR) with Kofu City could gain modal shift from other travel modes to rail+bus through improvement in the connection or introduction of a new interregional bus service connected with HSR. Expected changes in modal shares for rail+bus are estimated through a case study where a connection at the HSR station is hypothetically improved by a newly introduced interregional bus service. This suggests that improvements in connectivity at the HSR station could encourage the intermodal transportation service of rail+bus, even for areas not connected with the HSR network.

scholarly journals Commuting Pattern with Park-and-Ride Option for Heterogeneous Commuters

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chengjuan Zhu ◽  
Bin Jia ◽  
Linghui Han ◽  
Ziyou Gao
Keyword(s):  
Social Cost ◽  
Travel Demand ◽  
Transportation System ◽  
User Equilibrium ◽  
Service Capacity ◽  
Travel Choice ◽  
Bottleneck Model ◽  
Park And Ride ◽  
Total Social Cost ◽  
Limited Service

We study the effect of the parking on heterogeneous commuters' travel choice in a competitive transportation system which consists of a subway and a parallel road with a bottleneck of limited service capacity. Every morning, commuters either use their private cars only or drive their cars to the bottleneck, park there, and then take the subway to the destination. Considering the effects caused by body congestion in carriage and the parking fees, we developed a bottleneck model to describe the commuters' travel choice. There exist several types of equilibrium that corresponds to user equilibrium. We investigated the influence of the capacity of the bottleneck and the total travel demand on the travel behaviors and on the total social cost. It is shown that there exists a scheme with suitable subway fare and parking fees to implement the minimum total social cost.

scholarly journals Optimization of Transit Scheduling Combined with Short-Turn Service Based on Real-Time Passenger Flow

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ailing Huang ◽  
Yijing Miao ◽  
Jiarui Li
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Public Transit ◽  
Load Ratio ◽  
Total System ◽  
Transit System ◽  
Fleet Size ◽  
Passenger Flow ◽  
Vehicle Data ◽  
Transit Scheduling ◽  
Working Day

In view of a series of problems, such as unable to meet the needs of passengers, high full load ratio or waste of carrying capacity on unbalanced passenger flow sections caused by the all-stop fleet scheduling in the urban public transit system, this paper proposed a bus combination scheduling strategy with considering short-turn service based on the imbalance coefficient of passenger flow and a method to determine the turning back point. A combined dispatching optimization model is established with the objective function of minimizing the total system cost which includes the waiting time cost of passengers, the congestion feeling cost and the operation cost of public transit enterprises. The headways of short-turn and all-stop scheme are optimized by the combined scheduling model, and the solution method is proposed. Taking Beijing No. A bus line as an empirical analysis object, the real-time passenger flow and vehicle data in a working day are collected and analyzed, and the optimized scheme of short-turn service combination scheduling is obtained. The results show that compared with the traditional all-stop fleet scheduling, the optimized short-turn service combination scheduling can reduce the fleet size by 4.9% and effectively improve the operation efficiency and system benefits.

scholarly journals Bus Route Design with a Bayesian Network Analysis of Bus Service Revenues

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Yi Liu ◽  
Yuanhua Jia ◽  
Xuesong Feng ◽  
Jiang Wu
Keyword(s):  
Network Analysis ◽  
Bayesian Network ◽  
Travel Demand ◽  
Network Approach ◽  
Passenger Transport ◽  
Passenger Demand ◽  
Route Design ◽  
Bus Service ◽  
Bus Services ◽  
Operation Cost

A Bayesian network is used to estimate revenues of bus services in consideration of the effect of bus travel demands, passenger transport distances, and so on. In this research, the area X in Beijing has been selected as the study area because of its relatively high bus travel demand and, on the contrary, unsatisfactory bus services. It is suggested that the proposed Bayesian network approach is able to rationally predict the probabilities of different revenues of various route services, from the perspectives of both satisfying passenger demand and decreasing bus operation cost. This way, the existing bus routes in the studied area can be optimized for their most probable high revenues.

scholarly journals Optimal Express Bus Routes Design with Limited-Stop Services for Long-Distance Commuters

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 1669 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongguo Ren ◽  
Zhenbao Wang ◽  
Yanyan Chen
Keyword(s):  
Route Planning ◽  
Optimization Method ◽  
Route Optimization ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Routing Problem ◽  
Fleet Size ◽  
Valid Instrument ◽  
Bus Service ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Bus Services

This research aimed to propose a route optimization method for long-distance commuter bus service to improve the attraction of public transport as a sustainable travel mode. Taking the express bus services (EBS) in Changping Corridor in Beijing as an example, we put forward an EBS route-planning method for long-distance commuter based on a solving algorithm for vehicle routing problem with pickups and deliveries (VRPPD) to determine the length of routes, number of lines, and stop location. Mobile phone location (MPL) data served as a valid instrument for the origin–destination (OD) estimation, which provided a new perspective to identify the locations of homes and jobs. The OD distribution matrices were specified via geocoded MPL data. The optimization objective of the EBS is to minimize the total distance traveled by the lines, subject to maximum segment capacity constraints. The sensitivity analysis was done to several key factors (e.g., the segment capacity, vehicle capacity, and headway) influencing the number of lines, the length of routes. The results suggest that the scenario with the segment capacity of 4000 passengers/h has a minimum of number and length of lines, but we recommend that the transit agency adopt 3000 passengers/h as the route segment capacity because this scenario results in minimum fleet size and minimum total operation length.

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