Journal of Public Transportation最新文献

Planning public transport highly relies on the availability, quantity and quality of travel demand data of passengers. In the last two decades, smart card data has provided the opportunity to create comprehensive travel demand data as a byproduct of a fare-collecting system. One important attribute for the planning is the purpose of the trips, which is missing from the smart card data. This research study proposes and formulates a novel method to infer trip purpose in smart card data. Previous methods either lack the concept of trip chains or did not consider both spatial and temporal perspectives of a trip. Firstly, this method discovers relations between the sequence and temporal attributes of trips with their trip purpose attribute by running a clustering method on a rich travel survey dataset (This study only uses public transit records.) that contains all attributes. Secondly, the discovered clusters are labelled and transferred to the smart card data by calculating the closeness of the trip chain of each individual in the smart card data to the clusters. Thirdly, the proportion of relevant land use types near the destination of each trip is utilized to enhance the previously calculated closeness. The proposed method is implemented on datasets from South East Queensland, Australia. Also, two recently published methods were replicated and run on the same datasets to evaluate the proposed method. The results show improvements in the proposed method compared to the existing methods of the literature.

This study examines predictors of railway commuters' changes to departure time choice. Specifically, we sought to understand the impact of pre-departure information about in-carriage crowding on train choice behavior. We present the results of an online experiment, multiple-choice task, and a survey of UK rail commuters who regularly travel on crowded trains. Our findings show that most respondents are highly sensitive to crowding on trains. That notwithstanding, we identify a group of commuters who are free from constraints but do not use their flexibility to switch. This finding leads us to suggest further research into the decision-making processes of this specific sub-group of passengers to maximize the potential of personalized real-time and predictive provision of crowdedness information. Our study contributes insights relevant to practitioners grappling with innovative information provision to encourage operationally desirable behavior change among regular commuters.

Disruptions in public transit systems can have significant impacts on agency and passenger needs. Therefore, it is crucial to implement new transit policies to address these disruptions and to ensure efficient and reliable transit services. This study proposes a framework to assess alternative bus operating strategies to adapt with different disruptions to public transit systems. Conventional all-stop systems, visiting all the stops along a bus corridor, are compared against three alternative operational schemes: Skip-stop, express-local schemes with stop-skipping designs, and on-demand service with a fixed route but flexible stopping patterns, are compared to find the most efficient bus operating service under various circumstances. We developed an optimization model based on the total generalized system cost for each operating strategy using continuous approximation techniques and extended the previous models by comparing a wider range of alternative services and model flexibility to evaluate the optimum system in response to different disruptions. Different factors, such as the level of demand, demand patterns, and sensitivity to various components of transit trips for passengers and the operator, including crowding, denied boarding costs, and fleet constraints, are considered. We found that, given a different disruption scenario, demand, and travel patterns, the most efficient service can vary significantly between on-demand, all-stop, skip-stop, and express-local services. As such, it is suggested that the service scheme be chosen more adaptively by employing such frameworks.

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.

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.