Approaches to Determining the Regular Transit Route Duplication Level

Abstract

Issues of duplication of regular transit routes are of particular importance in the field of transport services provided to population and organisation of passenger transportation from the perspective of ensuring compliance with passengers needs for transportation and of the effects of route duplication on the technical, operational, and economic indicators of performance of these routes and the integral route network.In Russia duplication of regular routes within route networks emerged in the late 1990s – early 2000s in urban transit, other transit modes, and in interconnected transit. In the last decade, these routes have been increasingly subject to revision by local governments and executive bodies of federal constituent entities of the Russian Federation while solving transport planning problems and improving quality of transport services for the population.Evaluation of route duplication, as a rule, is carried out based on the route factor and the route duplication factor, the latter allows pairwise assessment of routes by the length of their overlapping segments.The objective of this article is to show incorrectness of the widespread technique and to present another approach that provides, in the author’s opinion, the correct interpretation of the method for determining the route duplication rate. Achieving this objective is based on methods of theoretical research in the field of organising passenger transportation.In development of this logic, the author proposed a new method for determining the route duplication factor using route adjacency factor, which considers directions and volumes of passenger origin-destination flows. Comparison of existing and proposed approaches is given using simple examples. The results of calculations have confirmed the different nature of factors and the absence of a direct relationship between the needs of passengers for transportation by public transport and the length of adjacent sections of routes. The conclusion is made about probable expediency of using the second (author’s) approach based on the route adjacency factor, which provides a correct solution to the stated transport planning problem. Besides, the possibility of using a new approach when performing diagnostics or designing route networks of different transport modes is shown both in relation to route matching and regarding their clusters and the entire route network.