Abstract
As a widely existing form of public transit fare structures, zone fare system is traditionally designed in a separate way, which may lead to suboptimal results. This paper aims to concurrently address the zone division and fare calculation issues of the zone fare system design in a rail transit line. It is necessary to consider passengers as well as operators to find an impartial zone fare system. A fair zone fare system is one where the zone fares are as close as possible to the distance-based fares, for the fares of the distance-based fare system are highly correlated with the actual distance of trips. Thus, the fare deviations for the trips between the zone fare system and the distance-based fare system are utilized as the evaluation metric of fairness. To achieve the goal of minimizing fare deviations for all trips, we introduce three indexes: average absolute deviation, average squared deviation, and maximum mileage fare deviation. With the three indexes as the objective functions, we develop a joint optimization algorithm where a novel zone boundary adjustment scheme is proposed as the key technique. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively provide a joint optimal scheme and the optimal number of planned zones is 5 for Changsha Metro Line 2. The proposed algorithm can provide guidance for the practical design and adjustment of the zone fare system.
Highlights
Fare is crucial to the financial situation of the rail transit. e price unit of tickets is directly determined by fare structure, which is the base and premise of the price formation
In terms of fares concerned by operators and passengers, compared with the distance-based fares, the highest and lowest zone fares are decreased by 1.18 yuan and increased by 0.14 yuan, respectively, and the average absolute deviation is 0.31 yuan. erefore, there will be no obvious change in the interests of passengers and operators by the transition from the current distance-based fare system to a zone fare one with 5 planned zones, and it can be speculated that this zone fare system scheme is acceptable to operators and passengers
We study the problems of zone fare system design in a rail transit line
Summary
Fare is crucial to the financial situation of the rail transit. e price unit of tickets is directly determined by fare structure, which is the base and premise of the price formation. With regard to exploiting the passengers’ willingness to pay, Otto and Boysen [2] showed that zone fare system is quite robust compared to the flat and distance-based fare systems According to these studies, we find that zone fare system is an economical and effective system in public transit. The fare deviations between the zone fare system and the distance-based fare system are used to evaluate the fairness of zone fare system For this reason, in the study period, the impact of the fare level on the number of passengers can be ignored. The zones-differential pricing method is used to calculate the zone fares for a given zone division scheme, and the zone fare level is determined according to the average distance-based fare . The following optimization methods can be extended to the zone-uniform pricing methods and other pricing means
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
