No-boarding buses: Synchronisation for efficiency

Abstract

We investigate a no-boarding policy in a system of N buses serving M bus stops in a loop, which is an entrainment mechanism to keep buses synchronised in a reasonably staggered configuration.Buses always allow alighting, but would disallow boarding if certain criteria are met. We let buses move with the same natural speed (applicable to programmable self-driving buses) and analytically calculate the average waiting time experienced by passengers waiting at the bus stop for a bus to arrive. Our analytical results show that a no-boarding policy can dramatically reduce the average waiting time, as compared to the usual situation without the no-boarding policy. Subsequently, we carry out simulations to verify these theoretical analyses, also extending the simulations to typical human-driven buses with different natural speeds based on real data. Finally, we describe a simple general adaptive algorithm to dynamically determine when to implement no-boarding.

Analysis and Simulation of Intervention Strategies against Bus Bunching by means of an Empirical Agent‐Based Model

“…e results of no-boarding in the busy-different scenario in Table 5 show marginal improvement in the waiting time Complexity of the passengers. is is consistent with the theory presented in [40] that a higher number of passenger arrival would result in a greater degree of speed modulation required to keep the buses unbunched. While our simulation study only captures a marginal improvement in waiting time, ref.…”

“…No-Boarding. Unlike holding strategy, which effectively slows down a bus when it draws too near to the leading bus, a no-boarding strategy serves to speed up buses which have their trailing buses too near [40], i.e., the backward headway h † d (or the trailing bus's h d ) is small. As the act of boarding passengers requires buses to stop and dwell at the bus stops, they can be "sped up" by not boarding the passengers at the bus stops.…”

“…In a recent work, Saw and Chew. [40] studied the effects of no-boarding with extensive simulations and provided analytical calculations for the average waiting time under the effects of no-boarding. In that paper, the no-boarding strategy is parameterized by a threshold distance, such that buses stop boarding passengers when their backward distance headway h † d falls below a particular threshold h † d,c .…”

“…is finding is not a contradiction to the theoretical work presented in ref. [40], which is based on buses having the same constant velocity. In the case where two buses of the same constant velocity are bunched, both buses will have (and constantly maintain) a backward headway of exactly zero.…”

“…While our simulation study only captures a marginal improvement in waiting time, ref. [40] shows significant savings in waiting time when the passenger arrival rates are even higher (average k � 0.063, where k � λ/l). is result is consistent with our analysis and supports that no-boarding is a viable strategy for a very busy bus system, even with buses travelling at different velocities.…”