01590120

Component

While bus systems are traditionally designed with fixed routes, this work presents an alternative flexible-route bus network, in which buses travel within predetermined areas in response to trip demand in order to provide door-to-door service. The main advantage of this system is that passenger access time to and from transit stops is removed. This paper considers a heterogeneous passenger demand distribution and designs a hybrid system that includes both hub-and-spoke and grid network features. While designing the optimal route layout and service operation, continuum approximation is used to reduce the computation burden and formulate the problem in terms of a few decision variables. Considering different demand levels and several patterns of spatially heterogeneous demand distributions, the authors compare the performance of flexible transit and fixed-route transit in terms of combined agency and user costs, and the maximum vehicle occupancy. It is found that demand heterogeneity gives rise to a larger cost-saving opportunity for flexible-route transit than the fixed-route transit. As a result, the flexible-route transit is superior under a wider range of demand levels under heterogeneous demand than under homogeneous demand.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP050 Standing Committee on Bus Transit Systems.

01584066

16-0534

English

20p

2016

Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Bus routes; Bus transit; Costs; Demand responsive transportation; Optimization; Passengers; Routes; Travel demand; Vehicle occupancy

Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2016 Paper #16-0534

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 12 2016 4:23PM