Designing limited-stop bus services for minimizing operator and user costs under crowding conditions
Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Date
2023
Subject Area
mode - bus, ridership - demand, operations - crowding, operations - scheduling, economics - operating costs
Keywords
Public transport, Rush hours, In-vehicle crowding, Dwell time, Limited-stop service, Genetic algorithm
Abstract
Dwell time is the amount of time required for performing boarding and alighting activities at stops. Under peak-load conditions, the dwell time can significantly increase due to a higher friction between on-board passengers when alighting and boarding. The influence of on-board crowding on increasing dwell time is indisputable. Herein, we develop a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to optimize limited-stop patterns for bus services to minimize user and operator costs. The number of non-stop consecutive buses authorized to skip a station and in-vehicle crowding conditions are explicitly considered in our modeling framework. The benefits of limited-stop bus services are mainly overestimated in previous studies that ignore such operating conditions. Moreover, a genetic algorithm is developed to solve the problem in real-world cases. The findings show that the implementation of a limited-stop bus service can reduce in-vehicle travel times for passengers and operating costs for bus agencies in all-demand cases. Nonetheless, it can increase waiting times for users whose origin or destination stations are skipped due to the implementation of limited-stop services. Thus, the desirability of a limited-stop service can decrease with the growth of the demand level.
Rights
Permission to publish the abstract has been given by SpringerLink, copyright remains with them.
Recommended Citation
Sadrani, M., Jafarian-Moghaddam, A.R., Esfahani, M.A., & Rahimi, A.M. (2023). Designing limited-stop bus services for minimizing operator and user costs under crowding conditions. Public Transport, Vol. 15, pp. 97–128.
