Joint design of public transit and autonomous vehicle mobility systems for tourist cities considering private tour trips
Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Date
2025
Subject Area
planning - integration, planning - network design, infrastructure - fleet management, ridership - demand
Keywords
Transit network design, Shared autonomous vehicle, Private tour trip, Network queuing theory, Parsimonious continuum approach
Abstract
Promoting shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) in tourist cities is promising, and probably induces so-called private tour trips (“PT trips”) — Travelers go through multiple intermediate stops with their preferred dwell time before reaching destinations in SAVs for entertainment and privacy (e.g., sightseeing and photography). For mobility service providers to serve different types of demand throughout the day including PT trips, this study proposes the Shared Autonomous Vehicle and Transit (SAV-T) integrated system, which strikes a balance between efficiency and accessibility through feeding fixed-route transit (FRT) by SAV. Service characteristics of SAVs are devised, prohibiting carpooling for PT trips to guarantee privacy and permitting it for normal trips. To overcome the difficulty to determine SAV fleet size and FRT network layout required to accommodate different types of demand, we adopt a parsimonious continuum approach and derive flow equilibrium equations using a network queuing theory. Accordingly, we compute the system cost consisting of agency and user costs for both peak and off-peak periods. By minimizing the system cost, SAV-T design problem is formulated as a mixed integer program and solved numerically. We demonstrate the advantage of integrating various SAV types with transit despite serving those “costly” PT trips in tourist cities — SAV-T saves system costs (up to 15%) compared to related transit systems that need not serve a significant number of PT trips. The impact of PT trips on the integrated system design is examined, including the fleet size of SAVs and layout of FRT in different scenarios, by varying the proportion of PT trips, total demand levels, etc.
Rights
Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.
Recommended Citation
Shi, Z., Luo, S., Niu, L., & Shao, C. (2025). Joint design of public transit and autonomous vehicle mobility systems for tourist cities considering private tour trips. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 178, 105179.
Comments
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http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0968090X