Analysing improvements to on-street public transport systems: a mesoscopic model approach

Abstract

Light rail transit and bus rapid transit have shown to be efficient and costeffective in improving public transport systems of cities around the world. As these systems comprise various elements, which can be tailored to any given setting, e.g. pre-board fare-collection, holding strategies and other Advanced Public Transport Systems (APTS), the attractiveness of such systems depend heavily on their implementation. In the early planning stage it is advantageous to deploy simple and transparent models to evaluate possible ways of implementation. For this purpose, the present study develops a mesoscopic model which makes it possible to evaluate public transport operations in details, including dwell times, intelligent traffic signal timings and holding strategies while modelling impacts from other traffic using statistical distributional data thereby ensuring simplicity in use and fast computational times. This makes it appropriate for analysing the impacts of improvements to public transport operations, individually or in combination, in early planning stages. The paper presents a joint measure of reliability for such evaluations based on passengers' perceived travel time by considering headway time regularity and running time variability, i.e. taking into account waiting time and in-vehicle time. The approach was applied on a case study by assessing the effects of implementing segregated infrastructure and APTS-elements, individually and in combination. The results showed that the reliability of on-street public transport operations mainly depends on APTS-elements, and especially holding strategies, whereas pure infrastructure improvements induced travel time reductions. The results further suggested that synergy effects can be obtained by planning on-street public transport coherently in terms of reduced travel times and increased reliability.

The relationship between norms, satisfaction and public transport use: A comparison across six European cities using structural equation modelling

“…Secondly, satisfaction is a multi-dimensional construct because transit systems comprise of multiple operative dimensions including service characteristics and coverage, fleet management, passenger flows, advanced public transport systems (APTS) and human interaction. Thirdly, service disruptions result in heavy burden on transit passengers, as sources of travel time uncertainty constitute up to 50% of the total travel time by buses in Copenhagen (Ingvardson et al, 2017a). Hence, the drivers of satisfaction and their individual significance in attracting ridership are important to investigate further.…”

Urban rail transit signal and control based on Internet of Things

“…Compared with foreign countries, the development of urban rail transit in China has a shorter development time, and rail technology and engineering construction experience are still at a mature stage [5]. Numerous majors, huge investment, complicated technology, long construction period, and susceptibility to external factors are the salient features of urban rail transit projects.…”

Designing bus rapid transit systems: Lessons on service reliability and operations

“…Previous studies have often focused on high-level, average and aggregate service indicators, assuming that an adequate design of the BRT system results in reliability improvements but lacked empirical underpinning as highlighted by Currie (2006) and Deng and Nelson (2011). Several traffic simulation models have been proposed for evaluating the operations of BRT service features such as right-of-way, boarding from all doors policy and headwaybased operations (Abdelghany et al, 2008;Toledo et al, 2010;Ingvardson et al, 2017;Fadaei and Cats, 2016;West and Cats, 2017).…”