Impacts of bus stop location and berth number on urban network traffic performance

Abstract

The effects of operational characteristics of the public transport system on the performance of the urban network traffic flow and the public transport system have been widely investigated at the local level. However, to the best of authors' knowledge, there is no attempt to investigate these characteristics at the network level. This study bridges this gap through the notion of network macroscopic fundamental diagram. In particular, the effects of the bus stop location (i.e. far-side and near-side) and berth number are discussed at the network level through simulating different scenarios in the central business district of the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. In consistent with the local level studies, the outputs show that the far-side bus stops result in better network performance (i.e. larger capacity and critical density range) and a lower median for the network average delay of car traffic. The near-side bus stops instead lead to a lower median for the public transport system. The results reveal that increasing the berth number improves the network capacity and median of the network average delay for both modes. Finally, the impacts of the combination of the far-side and near-side bus stop on network performance have been discussed.