Flexible Public Transport Research Articles

How successful is my DRT system? A review of different parameters to consider when developing flexible public transport systems

The digitisation of transport services has led to the implementation of so-called demand-responsive transport (DRT) systems with varying setups and goals around the globe. Numerous approaches have been made to account for differences in the local circumstances and regulations to achieve the most successful outcome for those services in both, rural and urban areas. The reasons for their widespread popularity are the envisaged benefits of economically reasonable operations combined with ecologically and socially beneficial traffic. Yet, while some DRT systems persist over an extended period, many fail to become a permanent passenger transportation option, especially in rural areas.This paper shall explore parameters suited to measure the success of a DRT system and structure their inter-dependencies. Firstly, the paper presents types of flexibility and their different gradations in order to classify varying systems. Secondly, suitable and already used parameters to measure figures of DRT systems like travelled distances and vehicle occupations are examined and with their respective application cases lucidly compared. Thirdly, the paper proposes a four-step evaluation framework and discusses existing and new approaches to comparing the success of different flexible transport systems and future possibilities.

Integrated optimization of timetable, bus formation, and vehicle scheduling in autonomous modular public transport systems

This paper presents a joint optimization of the timetable, bus formation, and vehicle scheduling in a flexible public transport (PT) system that utilizes autonomous modular vehicles (AMVs). In this system, AMVs have the capability to detach or join with each other at intermediate stops along the route to dynamically adjust the bus formation (capacity). To increase vehicle utilization, a flexible scheduling strategy is proposed that allows AMVs to detach from one modular bus and join another modular bus in either direction of a bidirectional line. In particular, the penalty cost for each detachment or joining operation, as well as the limited number of available AMVs is explicitly considered. We formulate a unified model for the integrated optimization of the modular bus service (timetable and bus formation) and vehicle scheduling by introducing two types of decision variables. The objective is to minimize overall system costs, including passenger waiting time cost, operational costs, and detachment/joining penalty costs. The two types of decision variables are coupled by a vehicle resource consistency constraint, ensuring the conformity of the modular bus service and vehicle scheduling decisions. To tackle the complexity of our model, the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is employed to decompose it into two subproblems, which can be efficiently solved using a customized forward dynamic programming algorithm and a commercial solver. The model is validated using illustrative examples and a real-world instance from the Beijing Public Transport system, and it is compared with two benchmark models. Our results demonstrate the efficiency of the ADMM-based solution framework for solving the integrated optimization model. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the use of AMVs in PT systems can lead to reduced overall system costs and increased vehicle utilization.

Investigating occasional travel patterns based on smartcard transactions

Public transportation (PT) studies often neglect non-routine trips focusing predominantly on commuting. However, recent research revealed that occasional trips make up a substantial portion of public transport journeys, and traveler preferences for non-routine trips diverge from their preferences for regular commuting. We study non-routine trips based on a database of 63 million smartcard (SC) records of PT boardings made in Israel during June 2019. The characteristics of these trips are revealed by clustering PT users’ boarding records based on the location of the boarding stops and time of day, applying an extended DBSCAN algorithm. Our major findings are that (1) conventional home-work-home commuters are a minority in Israel and constitute less than 15% of the riders; (2) at least 30% of the PT trips do not belong to any cluster and can be classified as occasional; (3) The vast majority of users make both recurrent and occasional trips. A linear regression model provides a good estimate (R2 = 0.85) of the number of occasional boardings at a stop as a function of the total number of boardings, time of day, and land use composition around the location of trip origin. We discuss the potential applications of our approach in the landscape of diverse flexible PT.

Optimization design of real-time scheduling scheme for city bus vehicles based on BP neural network

Urban public transportation is inseparably related to people’s travel and life. Prioritizing the development of public transportation is a major national policy proposed by the Chinese government, especially to actively promote the development of intelligent public transportation systems. Developing and building advanced intelligent public transport operation and scheduling management system, designing efficient, flexible and low-cost operation and scheduling mode, improving the management level and service quality of public transport enterprises, and thus improving the road traffic condition of the whole city, is undoubtedly the future development direction of public transport enterprises. This paper combines the problems of bus operation and scheduling in China at the present stage, and proposes the operation and scheduling model and method of the intelligent urban public transportation planning system, with a view to realizing a flexible public transportation operation model suitable for different service situations and providing systematic theoretical support for solving the imbalance between supply and demand of public transportation.

Automation as an enabler: Passengers’ experience of travelling with a full-length automated bus and their expectations of a future public transport system

Twenty-two frequent public transport users experienced travelling with a fully automated, full-length bus on a test course that included nine simulated everyday traffic situations. Most participants experienced the journey as very positive and their trust in the automated system was high. In general, they were positive about using automated buses in the future but believed that this would not improve their travelling experience or change their travel behaviour without additional modifications to the system, such as dedicated public transport lanes etc. Many believed that the introduction of automated buses could create conditions for increased access to transport in rural areas and that the automated technology might enable new services that would have a great impact on public transport development, contributing a more individual, efficient and flexible public transport system.

Performance evaluation for demand responsive transport services: A two-stage bootstrap-DEA and ordinary least square approach

Demand responsive transport (DRT) services have often been introduced to provide flexible public transport services, especially for areas with dispersed demand. However, objectively evaluating the performance of DRT services is challenging. This study uses a two-stage bootstrapped DEA and Ordinary Least Square (OLS) approach to measure performance using the Taiwanese DRT services as the empirical setting. In the first stage, bias-corrected Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) efficiency scores are calculated by employing the smoothed homogenous bootstrapped procedure (Simar & Wilson, 2000). In the second stage, a OLS regression model is used to explore the impact from external factors with bias-corrected DEA efficiency scores as the dependent variable. Model results confirm that more than half of DRT services have increasing return to scale. The model results also show heavy rail services bring significant negative impact to the DRT service performance. This finding implies the main users of DRT services are local residents with fewer intercity travellers who typically would use heavy rail for access. The model results can lead to an improvement strategy for DRT services, for example, having a strategy to attract tourists to use DRT services to access tourist attraction sites would be one way to increase demand which would have the added advantage of improving sustainability. This study evaluates how this might improve public transport network accessibility and concludes with recommendations of a way forward to provide more sustainable DRT services.

For the young and old alike – An analysis of the determinants of seniors’ satisfaction with the true door-to-door DRT system EcoBus in rural Germany

Mobility and transportation service requirements change with growing age. Also in a car-based society like Germany many seniors need to give up driving the car and are dependent on relatives or public transport. Especially in rural areas, the accessibility of public transport is often limited. Demand responsive transportation has occasionally been proposed by researchers as a viable alternative to stop-, route- and time-based public transportation to address such problems. This case study analyses passenger data from the true DRT system EcoBus to identify distinct drivers of old passengers’ satisfaction compared to other passengers. Contrary to existing literature, older people stated to be even more satisfied with the service then younger travellers did. Moreover, older travellers tend to travel alone, but showed slightly higher satisfaction when travelling in groups. The results suggest that older people might be more open-minded and positive regarding flexible public transport schemes than expected.

The perception of service quality among paratransit users in Metro Manila using structural equations modelling (SEM) approach

Paratransit, in this paper, refers to the informal modes operating in the urban transport system of Metro Manila with the dominance of public utility jeepneys. In the context of Asian developing countries, paratransit are generally presented as public transport services that do not fit with the idea of a modern urban public transport system but they also serve as flexible public transport modes in response to inadequate mass transit system. There is plenty of scope for improving such paratransit services in Metro Manila but strategies should be informed by a thorough understanding of the needs of public transport users from a service quality perspective. Moreover, there is a need for urgent reforms in view of declining share of public transport and the drastic increase in private car use, as well as, the increasing social cost of traffic congestion. A pilot public transport service quality survey was conducted at the University of the Philippines campus. Using exploratory factor analysis and structural equations modelling, the perception of service quality was analyzed based on seven (7) factors, namely, vehicle condition, customer care, reliability, stop's condition, information, convenience, and availability.

A business model perspective to understand intra-firm transitions: From traditional to flexible public transport services

Socio technological transition with respect to innovations is a broader concept and generally is theorized as such. It is, therefore, unclear how at the micro level, the business firms within an industry is restructuring internally to accommodate the technological innovations. Insights of this process management is uniquely valuable to understand how local technological niches and larger socio-technological transformations are being accommodated in industrial reforms. A business model perspective could provide insights of these innovation process management, in this context the mobility transition from fixed to flexible public transport (FPT) systems. Taking business models as the unit of analysis, in this paper we provide a framework to map the transition process. The framework is applied to a case study of a traditional public transport firm in the Netherlands. We map the evolution of the business models taking the local external developments into account. We define three phases for the business model mapping here – pre FPT, during FPT and the future of FPT. Findings suggest a complete shift in client orientation of public transport authorities with geared up efforts in digitalization and value creation during these three phases of FPT transition. Perhaps the most striking - yet not completely unexpected – outcome for transit companies is to gradually assume a role of facilitator as opposed to a provider of public transit, which potentially will have a thorough reform of the industry. This initial trace of internal transition, however incomplete, provides useful insights of the overall product and process management and the emerging business model configurations and contributes to the learning trajectory of FPT service organizations.

Predicting taxi demands via an attention-based convolutional recurrent neural network

As a flexible public transportation in urban areas, taxis play an important role in providing comfortable and convenient services for passengers. Due to the existence of the imbalance between supply of drivers and demand of passengers, an accurate fine-grained taxi demand prediction in real time can help guide drivers to plan their routes and reduce the waiting time of passengers. Recently, several methods based on deep neural networks have been provided to predict taxi demands. However, these works are limited in properly incorporating multi-view features of taxi demands together, with considering the influences of context information. In this paper, we propose a convolutional recurrent network model for fine-grained taxi demand prediction. Local convolutional layers and gated recurrent units are employed in our model to extract multi-view spatial–temporal features of taxi demands. Moreover, a novel context-aware attention module is designed to incorporate the predictions of each region with considering its contextual information, which is our first attempt. We also conduct comprehensive experiments based on multiple real-world datasets in New York City and Chengdu. The experimental results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and validate the usefulness of each module in our model.

Integrated route choice and assignment model for fixed and flexible public transport systems

The recent technological innovations in various ICT platforms have given rise to innovative mobility solutions. Such systems could potentially address some of the inherent shortcomings of a line/schedule based public transport system. Previous studies either assumed that flexible on-demand services are used as an exclusive door-to-door service or offered as a feeder connection to high-capacity public transport services. However, users may combine line/schedule based public transport systems (Fixed PT) and on-demand services (Flexible PT) so that their travel impedance is minimized. To this end, we propose a multimodal route choice and assignment model that allows users combining Fixed and Flexible PT or use them as individual modes while demand for these services is endogenously determined. The model takes into account the dynamic demand–supply interaction using an iterative learning framework. Flexible public transport can be used to perform any part of the trip, ranging from a first/last mile service to an exclusive direct door-to-door connection. The developed model is implemented in an agent based simulation framework. The model is applied to a network centered around the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Scenarios where Fixed PT and Flexible PT are offered as mutually exclusive modes or can be combined into a single journey, are analysed. Results indicate that Flexible PT is predominantly used for covering <30% of the trip length, indicating that it is mainly used as an access or egress mode to Fixed PT. This results with an overall increase in the share of public transport trips. Also, the average waiting time of Flexible PT users when used in combination with Fixed PT are lower than the scenario where each of them is used as an exclusive mode.

Potential uptake of adaptive transport services: An exploration of service attributes and attitudes

This paper describes an examination of people's preferences regarding a wide range of flexible and demand-responsive adaptive transport services in the Netherlands. We used a stated choice experiment, which included a set of attributes, such as access to the service, schedule, window of departure and arrival time, travel costs and travel time. Four mixed logit models were estimated based on a dataset of 3632 observations (454 respondents). Various service attributes were found to have a significant influence on the potential of alternatives, including fixed stops and a wide time window (valued negatively) and door-to-door transport and unscheduled transport (valued positively). In addition, attitudes towards conventional and modern service types were relevant determinants for the potential uptake of ATS. In particular, having a positive attitude towards public transport was found to increase the likelihood of using stop-based (defined mobility) services. Finally, our results reveal that existing public transport users displayed a greater willingness to use flexible public transport alternatives, whereas car drivers were more inclined to use car- and ride-sharing services.

Customized bus service design for jointly optimizing passenger-to-vehicle assignment and vehicle routing

Emerging transportation network services, such as customized buses, hold the promise of expanding overall traveler accessibility in congested metropolitan areas. A number of internet-based customized bus services have been planned and deployed for major origin-destination (OD) pairs to/from inner cities with limited physical road infrastructure. In this research, we aim to develop a joint optimization model for addressing a number of practical challenges for providing flexible public transportation services. First, how to maintain minimum loading rate requirements and increase the number of customers per bus for the bus operators to reach long-term profitability. Second, how to optimize detailed bus routing and timetabling plans to satisfy a wide range of specific user constraints, such as passengers’ pickup and delivery locations with preferred time windows, through flexible decision for matching passengers to bus routes. From a space-time network modeling perspective, this paper develops a multi-commodity network flow-based optimization model to formulate a customized bus service network design problem so as to optimize the utilization of the vehicle capacity while satisfying individual demand requests defined through space-time windows. We further develop a solution algorithm based on the Lagrangian decomposition for the primal problem and a space-time prism based method to reduce the solution search space. Case studies using both the illustrative and real-world large-scale transportation networks are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and its sensitivity under different practical operating conditions.

Performance assessment of fixed and flexible public transport in a multi agent simulation framework

The emergence of innovative mobility solutions that offer flexible transport services, is changing the way urban public transport systems will be designed. Such mobility solutions offer on demand transport services and hence can solve the problems inherent with traditional line based and schedule based public transport systems. It is essential to understand the dynamics of this new demand-supply market with co-existing and competing fixed and flexible public transport. However, the performance of the system comprising of users and transit services and the factors influencing them, have received limited attention in literature. In this paper a model is developed to analyse the system performance when the modes of fixed public transport and flexible public transport operate in competition. The model is implemented in the multi-agent simulation framework MATSim with dynamic assignment in which the users optimise their travel plan through iterative learning from the service experienced and altering their travel plan. The scenarios in which the flexible public transport offer private and shared services are considered. The system performance is analysed for varying fleet size of flexible public transport and ratio of cost of flexible to fixed public transport.

Big buses in a small country: The prospects for bus services in Wales

The evolution of the bus market and industry in Wales since deregulation in the mid-1980s is reviewed. After a brief period of competition, which seemed to offer the prospect of welfare gains, the industry rapidly consolidated, with resulting losses in bus usage and welfare, similar to the rest of Great Britain outside London. There were large increases in subsidy following the introduction of a national free concessionary fares scheme in 2002. There is some evidence that some of this subsidy has leaked, at least some of the time, into super-normal profits, in part due to generous concessionary fare reimbursement terms. For the urban parts of Wales, particularly in the North East (centred on Wrexham) and the South East (centred on Cardiff), there are aspirations to develop Bus Rapid Transit to supplement the existing rail network. For rural Wales, there have been long standing aspirations to develop more flexible public transport services and long distance bus services, but this has often been thwarted by lack of funding. Organisational reforms that might assist the Welsh Government in delivering these aspirations are reviewed, including Quality Contracts, Quality Partnerships and Community Partnerships.

State of the Art of Paratransit Literatures in Asian Developing Countries

Paratransit systems cause traffic and environmental issues but they also serve as a personalized and flexible public transport mode in response to passenger demand, especially in Asian developing countries. Given the lack of an adequate mass transit system, the paratransit service is indispensable, while a harmonized public transport system has also recently attracted considerable interest. This paper reviews the paratransit literature and summarizes the existing fields of studies, establishes a common terminology for paratransit services, provides a more comprehensive classification scheme for the paratransit system, and discusses potential issues in relation to its sustainability. In the existing literature, the authors identify four key factors necessary to sustain the paratransit system such as improvements in the quality of service, integration with mass transit systems, promotion of electric paratransit modes, and government support. This information provides insights into strategic planning for increased harmonization of public transport systems in Asian developing countries.

Elastyczne systemy transportu publicznego - istota, rodzaje, przesłanki rozwoju

Elastyczne systemy transportu publicznego - istota, rodzaje, przesłanki rozwoju

The Distribution of Decision Making

Nowadays, the cockpit model for public policy planning has been largely replaced by a model of distributed decision making. Taking a dramaturgical perspective on politics, this article follows issues when they are displaced between different settings for decision making. A typology of five different displacements is proposed and linked to staging effects of settings. This typology could form the basis of a theory with which complex, interactive, and distributed decision-making processes can be understood in more general terms. The approach is applied to a case of decision making about an innovative flexible public transport system in the Netherlands.

Some Insights into the Key Influences on Trip-Chaining Activity and Public Transport Use of Seniors and the Elderly

ABSTRACT In this paper, we use a pooled (2002–2004) cross section of the Sydney Household Travel Survey, an annual continuous survey conducted since 1997, to investigate the current profile of trip-chaining travel activity of individuals over 64 years of age (i.e., seniors). A nested logit model is developed to investigate the choices made between six trip-chain categories, distinguished by the level of “complexity” and the primary mode—car as driver, car as passenger, and public transport. A benchmark setting for today not only establishes the way in which the elderly “cope” with the existing supply network and the available modal alternatives, given their needs, but also is useful in providing hints about what might be some emerging transport policy and planning challenges in the future given the aging of the population. The key influences on the trip chain and modal behavior of individuals over the age of 64, by gender, is currency of a driver's license, living with a partner, and the specific age range over 64 years. The loss of a driver's license and a partner have the potential to be major contributors to social isolation in the absence of inadequate flexible public transport and/or support mechanisms that enable access to the car as a passenger.