Journal of Public Transportation最新文献

A safe and convenient bus service is important for improving the bus mode share. However, during the morning and evening peak travel periods, hurrying passengers may get caught in closing doors when they squeeze into a bus. We conducted a survey of bus door pinch accidents that occurred in Harbin, China for the past five years to investigate the factors contributing to such accidents. A total of 1465 samples were collected to explore the effects of passenger age, gender, and other factors on pinching accidents. The results of the logit regression analysis revealed that all six influencing factors significantly affect the occurrence of door pinch accidents. Juveniles, females, and slow-moving people are more susceptible to pinch accidents. Additionally, situations such as door congestion, rushing to get on or off the bus, and inappropriately located cameras increase the likelihood of such accidents. To further investigate the effects of variables on different scenarios, the accidents were classified into four categories based on their occurrence process and object and analyzed using multiple logistic regression. The results show that juveniles and females are more likely to be involved in accidents in which objects are pinched, slow-moving people are more prone to be pinched while boarding and rushing to get on or off the bus, and congestion at the doors increases the probability of all four types of pinch accidents. Therefore, we recommend modifying the door position, eliminating the front door seat, and adjusting the handrail distribution to alleviate door congestion. Moreover, the door-closing warning sound must be amplified to remind passengers that the door is about to close, potentially reducing the number of pinching accidents caused by rushing to get on or off the bus.

With a rise in the number of elderly, and disabled individuals, there has been an increased focus on the mobility rights for mobility handicapped users. The subway is one of the most popular transportation modes for these groups, i.e., elderly and people with disability. The availability of vertical transport systems such as elevators, wheelchair lifts, and escalators in subway stations is crucial for their use of the subway. This study aims to evaluate the equity of the subway station regarding the installation of vertical transport systems using smart card data and open data sources in Seoul. Equity was defined as the number of vertical transport systems installed compared to the subway station attributes, including number of mobility handicapped user trips and station conditions. As a result, the proposed model estimated that the equity score for the subway stations was 0.48 on average. Out of 257 stations, 27 were found to be equitable with an equity score of 1.0. The equity score for the bottom 27 stations was 0.19 on average, meaning that 81% of facility improvement is needed to achieve an equity score of 1.0. Also, a practical application was performed to validate the proposed model. It was found that the proposed strategy was effective and efficient in enhancing the equity of vertical transport systems and saving costs for facility improvements. These findings suggest that investing or allocating facilities based on the needs of each station can lead to more equitable and efficient improvements in equity.

In order to improve the performance of a public transport system, it is important to know alighting counts as well as boarding counts at bus stops. While boarding is almost always available through a fare collection system, public transport systems usually do not count alighting passengers. This is either due to the overhead that may be required for passengers at exit or the installation of relatively expensive Automatic Passenger Counters (APC) counters at each vehicle. Therefore, such expensive deployments are mostly not encountered in public-transport systems. In our research, for round trip lines that are balanced in daily passenger counts on both forward and backward routes, the alighting counts of a target route are inferred using only the daily boarding data. Vehicle occupancy levels are determined on a trip basis owing to the characteristic boarding pattern of each line. The validity of the proposed method was determined and verified using video recordings of arbitrarily selected trips. Consequently, it may be possible to modify scheduling algorithms to improve vehicle fleet utilization and increase passenger comfort in public transportation.

Increasing the operating speed in public transport systems can increase the system capacity, reduce the overall passenger travel time and improve experienced comfort. Skip-stop operation, where subsets of the trains operating on the same tracks skip certain intermediate stops, can accelerate the service and improve passengers’ overall travel experience. This paper considers the problem of deciding whether skip-stop operation is beneficial for a given line and which stopping scheme is the most effective. In particular, we investigate whether a simple decision rule for determining the stopping pattern under a skip-stop strategy, derived from the expected weighted time benefits to the passengers, can reliably determine the most suitable skip-stop scheme. To evaluate the impact of alternative stop-skipping strategies, we adopt the existing public transit assignment model BusMezzo, which allows for a realistic representation of passengers’ experienced waiting and in-vehicle travel times and the resulting trade-offs between passenger costs and benefits. The decision rule is applied to a set of high-frequency urban rail lines in Stockholm, Sweden. We show that a simple decision rule may not be a robust way of determining a beneficial skip-stop scheme. The results from the case study reveal that the skip-stop operation can have an overall positive impact on passenger generalized travel time but only under certain conditions at the stops along the line.

Fleet replacement is an important decision-making activity in public transit planning and operations. Recently, with the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and achieving carbon neutrality, diesel buses are being replaced with new electric buses (EBs) in many cities around the world. The study proposes a methodology to analyze and compare the life-cycle cost and passenger waiting time of multi-type EBs, so as to assist transit agencies in determining the optimum EB type to replace existing diesel buses. The proposed methodology is applied to a real-life case study of a bus line in Dandong, China. The case study includes six types of EBs categorized by their charging technologies and passenger capacities, including three slow-charging EBs with capacities of 40, 60, and 76 passengers, as well as three fast-charging EBs with capacities of 50, 65, and 75 passengers. The results show that no matter which charging technology is considered, the life-cycle cost of large-size EBs is the lowest. From the perspective of passengers, small-size EBs resulting in shorter waiting time are more favorable. When passenger demands on all route segments change with the same rate, the total passenger waiting time for each vehicle type will not change. But, with the increase of passenger demand, the average passenger waiting time decreases for all vehicle types. The results also indicate that the bus line length does not have a significant impact on EB vehicle selection. In addition, the phase-out of the vehicle purchase subsidy policy will have no impact on EB type selection due to the current low-level purchase subsides.