Journal of Public Transportation最新文献

This paper presents a novel mathematical model, integrating timetabling and vehicle scheduling problems for electric buses. The objective is to minimize the number of buses while satisfying constraints concerning routing and charging, including design choices for where to install charging stations. The aim of the paper is to illustrate and discuss the effects of solving the timetabling and vehicle scheduling of electric buses (including where to install charging infrastructure) separately, compared to solving them jointly in one single step. For that purpose, we perform tests with: i) given timetable, that is, solving only the vehicle scheduling problem, ii) fixed headways for each line, and iii) variable headways. A small test case based on actual bus lines from Västra Frölunda, Gothenburg, Sweden, is used. From the numerical experiments, we verify that combining the two planning steps can significantly reduce the number of vehicles needed.

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.

The timing of public transport provision in newly established suburbs on the urban fringe is a major concern for residents. It is argued that if public transport were available when residents start moving to a new suburb, they are more likely to use it. Despite this, the timing of public transport service provision relative to residential development is generally unknown. Using a case study of Melbourne, Australia, this article provides a methodology to measure the timing of bus provision relative to residential development. Information from Precinct Structure Plans, Census data, public transport timetables, and a spatial analysis based on Open Street Map, Metromap and Google Earth, were used. Results show that new communities on Melbourne’s urban fringe had to wait 3–4 years on average for a bus service to be implemented. About one quarter (24%) of the communities were already served by a bus service when residents started to move in, 12% had to wait up to a year, and about two-thirds (64%) had to wait for longer than a year, as much as 14 years. For those waiting more than one year, bus provision comes too late to capitalise on the higher likelihood of public transport use through early delivery. To improve public transport delivery in those areas and understand where issues exist, government agencies should monitor the waiting time of communities and support an earlier delivery of public transport through improved land use and transport integration.

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.

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.