Abstract
Flexible transit services, which bring together the characteristics of fixed-route transit and demand-responsive transit, have been proven to be cost-efficient in low-density residential areas. In this paper, a methodology is proposed to assist planners in making better decisions when choosing between route deviation policy and point deviation policy, which are two promising types of flexible transit services. A user cost function is developed to measure the service quality of the transit systems, and analytical models are constructed to compare the system performance under both expected and unexpected demand levels. Based on the experiments for various scenarios over a real-life transit example, the critical demands, which represent the switching point between the two competing service policies, have been derived. Our findings show that point deviation policy is more efficient at low-demand levels, while route deviation policy is a better choice at low-to-moderate demand levels. At unexpectedly high demand levels, route deviation policy is better able to accommodate rejected passengers than point deviation policy.
Highlights
With the acceleration of urbanization in recent decades, an increasing number of suburban areas with low population density have arisen
Researchers and practitioners seek to introduce flexible transit services to meet the needs of new travel patterns in suburban and rural areas
The route deviation systems are much more constrained than those allowed for point deviation; they must operate along a well-defined path and deviate to serve curb-to-curb requests within a service area around the path [9]
Summary
With the acceleration of urbanization in recent decades, an increasing number of suburban areas with low population density have arisen. Demand-responsive transit, which can provide much of the desired flexibility with curb-to-curb services, is considered costly to deploy and is mostly limited to specialized operations such as paratransit for people with reduced mobility [1] To address these issues, researchers and practitioners seek to introduce flexible transit services to meet the needs of new travel patterns in suburban and rural areas. With the rapid development of intelligent transportation systems, point deviation is becoming a promising operating policy from a long-term perspective Most of these studies revealed that flexible transit services are promising operating policies for shaping new travel patterns in low-demand areas and passengers are generally willing to use these innovative transit systems [7, 8]. Our work serves as a meaningful step towards selecting between flexible transit services in areas with low and fluctuating travel demand
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