Planning skip-stop transit service under heterogeneous demands

Authors

Yu Mei
Weihua Gu
Michael Cassidy
Wenbo Fan

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2021

Subject Area

place - urban, ridership - demand, operations - scheduling

Keywords

Transit corridor design, Skip-stop service, Continuous approximation, Heterogeneous demand

Abstract

Transit vehicles operating under skip-stop service visit only a subset of the stops residing along a corridor. It is a strategy commonly used to increase vehicle speeds and reduce patron travel times. The present paper develops a continuous approximation model to optimally design a select form of skip-stop service, termed AB-type service. The model accounts for demand patterns that slowly vary over space. An efficient heuristic is developed to obtain solutions. These are shown to be near-optimal for a variety of numerical examples. Results also indicate that optimal AB-type designs outperform optimized all-stop service in a variety of cases. The AB-type service is found to be especially competitive when travel demands are high, trip origins are unevenly distributed along a corridor, and patrons have relatively high values of time. In these cases, AB-type service is found to reduce system costs by as much as 8%.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

Comments

Transportation Research Part B Home Page:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01912615

Recommended Citation

Mei, Y., Gu, W., Cassidy, M., & Fan, W. (2021). Planning skip-stop transit service under heterogeneous demands. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Vol. 150, pp. 503-523.