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Designing limited-stop bus services for minimizing operator and user costs under crowding conditions

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Abstract

Dwell time is the amount of time required for performing boarding and alighting activities at stops. Under peak-load conditions, the dwell time can significantly increase due to a higher friction between on-board passengers when alighting and boarding. The influence of on-board crowding on increasing dwell time is indisputable. Herein, we develop a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to optimize limited-stop patterns for bus services to minimize user and operator costs. The number of non-stop consecutive buses authorized to skip a station and in-vehicle crowding conditions are explicitly considered in our modeling framework. The benefits of limited-stop bus services are mainly overestimated in previous studies that ignore such operating conditions. Moreover, a genetic algorithm is developed to solve the problem in real-world cases. The findings show that the implementation of a limited-stop bus service can reduce in-vehicle travel times for passengers and operating costs for bus agencies in all-demand cases. Nonetheless, it can increase waiting times for users whose origin or destination stations are skipped due to the implementation of limited-stop services. Thus, the desirability of a limited-stop service can decrease with the growth of the demand level.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the reviewers and the Editor-in-Chief (Prof. Stefan Voß) for the valuable comments, which have been very helpful in improving the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Railway Engineering and Transportation Planning, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Transportation, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

    Mohammad Sadrani, Ahmad Reza Jafarian-Moghaddam & Mohsen Aboutalebi Esfahani

  2. TUM School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich, 80333, Munich, Germany

    Mohammad Sadrani

  3. Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Zanjan, Zanjan, Iran

    Amir Masoud Rahimi

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  1. Mohammad Sadrani
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Contributions

MS: Conceptualization, methodology, mathematical modeling, developing solution method (genetic algorithm), programming, software, validation, formal analysis, manuscript writing-review and editing. ARJ-M: Supervision, project administration, result investigation, manuscript writing-review and editing. MAE: Supervision, result investigation, manuscript review. AMR: Advisor, result investigation, manuscript review.

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Correspondence to Ahmad Reza Jafarian-Moghaddam.

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Sadrani, M., Jafarian-Moghaddam, A.R., Esfahani, M.A. et al. Designing limited-stop bus services for minimizing operator and user costs under crowding conditions. Public Transp 15, 97–128 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12469-022-00307-2

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