A Self-Adjusting Method to Resist Bus Bunching Based on Boarding Limits

Abstract

Bus bunching is one of the most serious problems of urban bus systems. Bus bunching increases waiting and travel time of passengers. Many bus systems use schedules to reach equal headways. Compared to the idea of schedules and the target headway introduced later, we propose a new method to improve the efficiency of a bus system and avoid bus bunching by boarding limits. Our solution can be effectively implemented when buses cannot travel as planned because of bad road conditions and dynamic demands at bus stops. Besides, using our method, bus headways reach the state with equal headways dynamically and spontaneously without drivers’ explicit intervention. Moreover, the method can improve the level of the bus service and reduce total travel time of passengers. We verify our method using an ideal bus route and a real bus route, both showing the success of the proposed method.