Mass Transit Services Research Articles

Modelling traveller mode shift behavior from personalized two-wheelers to public transit for work trips : A stated preference approach for Indian metropolitan city

This study focuses on assessing potential thrust areas that can attract personalized vehicle based daily work trips to mass transit. The proposed study specifically targets to Tier-II medium sized Indian metropolises for the estimation of a probability mode shift from personalized 2-wheelers’ to public transport on the introduction of hypothetically designed improved mass transit services. Data pertaining to study were collected through a stated preference approach that involved home-interview and online survey methods. The Latent variable enriched binary logit mode-shift behaviour model was calibrated using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences platform and validated using hold-back data. The utility function developed using coefficients obtained through calibrated model can be further used as a user friendly tool for predicting pobability of mode shifts.The current research is an attempt to incorporate latent variables in context of Indian metropolitan area which has rarely been attempted by any researcher.

The Impact of Database on Geographical Information System and Smart Cities

The research discusses the substantial influence of databases in smart cities, affecting various facets and people's lives. It emphasizes the impact on Information Technology (IT) spending and database features, allowing access from anywhere at any time. Key elements crucial for smart city implementation include sustainability, adaptability, governance, improved living conditions, resource management, and city amenities. The research highlights defined components of smart cities and their applications, such as healthcare, mass transit, education, and energy services. It also focuses on how integrating Geographic Information Systems (GIS) aids decision-making. The study emphasizes the use of cloud computing for smart city database systems, outlining its benefits in data collection, storage, and analysis across various cloud nodes and facilities. It also highlights industries such as health insurance, public transportation, smart buildings, and energy that benefit from these technologies in decision-making processes. The paper's objective is to review database applications in smart cities and explore the potential use of big data..

Seamless Multimodal Transportation Scheduling

Ride-hailing services have expanded the role of shared mobility in passenger transportation systems, creating new markets and creative planning solutions for major urban centers. In this paper, we consider their use for the first-mile or last-mile passenger transportation in coordination with a mass transit service to provide a seamless multimodal transportation experience for the user. A system that provides passengers with predictable information on travel and waiting times in their commutes is immensely valuable. We envision that the passengers will inform the system of their desired travel and arrival windows so that the system can jointly optimize the schedules of passengers. The problem we study balances minimizing travel time and the number of trips taken by the last-mile vehicles, so that long-term planning, maintenance, and environmental impact are all taken into account. We focus on the case where the last-mile service aggregates passengers by destination. We show that this problem is NP-hard, and we propose a decision diagram–based branch-and-price decomposition model that can solve instances of real-world size (10,000 passengers spread over an hour, 50 last-mile destinations, 600 last-mile vehicles) in computational time (∼1 minute) that is orders of magnitude faster than the solution times of other methods appearing in the literature. Our experiments also indicate that aggregating passengers by destination on the last-mile service provides high-quality solutions to more general settings. History: Accepted by Pascal Van Hentenryck, Area Editor for Computational Modeling: Methods and Analysis. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2019.0163 ) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2019.0163 ). The complete IJOC Software and Data Repository is available at https://informsjoc.github.io/ .

The study of social inclusion and gender equality on public transport satisfaction: Case of Metropolitan Jakarta

Three types of mass transit services have been developed in Jakarta metropolitan area; however, it was found that the majority 80% of commuters are still using private vehicles. This paper aims to explore the reasons why most commuters are still preferring to opt using private vehicles. A total of 23 attributes concerning the quality of public transport services have been investigated by conducting surveys and collecting data. As result, even majority of users mentioned that they are satisfied with the overall quality of the mass of transit, they are still hoping for improvement in some services attributes. Also, female passengers and teenagers consider security officer presence as one of the attributes needed to be improved. To enhance social inclusion and promote gender equality, practical strategies are recommended such as discounts and improvement of feeder service, special wagon for female and youth passengers, and adjusted schedules to conform with school time.

Sustainable Transportation for Events: A Systematic Review

Event business is constantly growing in frequency and size, attracting people from nearby areas and different countries as well. Transportation plays a key role in a successful event, especially for major ones, where the large number of participants requires ad hoc designing of event mobility and might include implementation of new infrastructures. In recent decades, environmental issues have emphasized event negative externalities, leading to the design of green events. This paper presents a comprehensive systematic literature review on studies investigating the sustainable practices related to event mobility. The methodology showcases a selection of 32 articles, which were classified according to their main contributions into five categories, for which gaps and trends were shown. Our findings indicate that there are not enough studies to draw conclusions about good practices that can be generalized to each kind of event. Additionally, strong limitations in the reviewed papers are the different contexts of the analysis and the lack of a validation through empirical data. The research presented in this paper adds a contribution to the sustainable event transportation literature reporting the most established models, methods, and interventions. In detail, the most promising interventions involve mass transit and demand-oriented services that rely on intelligent transportation systems and user information.

Service Design in Competitive Tendering of Bus Routes

Transit systems and buses, in particular, generally suffer from severe financial problems that affect their sustainability and levels of service. In an attempt to revive these systems, public authorities have recently moved toward more private sector participation, which could improve cost efficiency. This participation can take different forms depending on the roles of each sector in the provision and production of public transport. This article examines the different models for private sector participation in the provision of mass transit services, describing their respective benefits and disadvantages for both transit providers and users. Focus is, however, given to one specific strategy—competitive tendering—because of its successful application worldwide and its suitability to the case study context. Competitive tender structuring elements that relate to determining the size of the contract to be tendered as well as the allocation of routes among bid packages (“serviee design”) is discussed in particular. A sound methodology for assessing bid packages of routes is developed and then applied for the case study of Beirut, Lebanon.

Importance performance analysis for evaluating city bus service quality in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

ABSTRACT Public bus transport service operators play a significant role in delivering residents’ mass transit services in cities. Thus, measuring their service performance is very important to know their strengths and weaknesses; meet residents’ rapidly growing mobility needs, and provide quality services. This study aims to assess the service quality of public buses in Addis Ababa, emphasizing on Importance-Performance Analysis model. A questionnaire consisting of thirty-one service quality attributes was used using a seven-point Likert scale. A face-to-face survey was conducted with 500 conveniently selected respondents to grasp passengers’ expectations and perceptions of public buses’ service quality in the city. Hence, based on Importance Performance Analysis, Customer Satisfaction Index, and level of Conformity analysis, 58.1% of the attributes are found under concentrate here and low priority quadrant. Therefore, the study suggests transit service operators and concerned stakeholders should provide urgent attention and allocate their resources to these attributes to improve the quality of service and enhance customer satisfaction with delivered services.

Assessing the Social and Economic Impact of Logistics Management on the Liberian Economy (the National Transit Authority 2015-2018)

Under the able leadership of Her Excellency Madam Sirleaf, the government envisioned that to address the many unemployment in Liberia, it was prudent to decentralize governance and all government services appertaining transportation from the transport ministry to the national transit authority (NTA) to alleviate huge unemployment deficiency with employment. Therefore, affordable public transportation for Liberians was identified as one of the areas for strategic intervention. Significantly, the remodeling of the Monrovia Transit Authority (MTA) into the National Transit Authority (NTA) tries to pursue decentralization to provide affordable, convenient, and reliable mass transit services to citizens throughout the breadth of the country for all citizenries. After over a decade of post-conflict growth and relative peace and stability since the end of the 1989-2003 conflict, Liberia’s transport infrastructure and logistics sector have the potential for enormous growth and development. Over the past period, there has been an increasing emphasis on supply chain and logistics management as a medium for firms to achieve competitive advantage in markets (Collins, 2003. P. 8). A large number of examples in the 1990s show how countries have made significant investments to streamline the supply chain to improve customer satisfaction and increase the internal productivity of their economy. In conclusion, this paper fully explores both the framework for and an analysis of such reflections of the civil unrest conflicts in Liberia and assessing the social and economic impact of logistics management of the Liberian economy.

Supervisor and customer incivility as moderators of the relationship between job insecurity and work engagement: Evidence from a new context

Earlier studies on job insecurity tested job resources that may buffer the usual negative impact of job insecurity on job outcomes. The current study extends prior results by establishing that, given certain conditions, such as during an economic crisis that often gives rise to a dearth of employment opportunities and a precariousness of employment, perceived job insecurity could positively predict work engagement. Specifically, this study examined the relationship between perceived job insecurity and work engagement, and supervisor and customer incivility as moderators of this relationship. Cross-sectional data were collected from 1,200 volunteer mini-bus drivers from nine mass transit services companies in the Southeastern region of Nigeria. Results of a structural equation model (SEM) showed that job insecurity was positively related to work engagement. In turn, this positive relationship was weakened by supervisor incivility (but not by customer incivility). The results suggest that when supervisors are not supervised they could jeopardize employee effort.

Joint design of shared-bike and transit services in corridors

The prevalence of shared bikes in many cities is a double-edged sword to the local mass transit services. Some transit patrons may switch to cycling, causing declines in the transit ridership. Others may benefit from using bikes instead of walking to access transit. The complicated interactions between the two modes entail the necessity of designing them jointly. Unfortunately, the literature has focused on either the design of a single mode or joint designs idealized by assuming a uniform demand pattern. The latter class of works has limited practical values.This paper develops a continuum approximation (CA) model for optimizing the hybrid design of shared-bike and transit services in a corridor under spatially heterogeneous demand patterns. The model minimizes the generalized system cost considering various route options that patrons can choose from, including transit routes with walking or biking access and bike-only routes. The methodological challenges that arise due to patrons’ route choices in the heterogeneous operating environment are overcome by incorporating a route assignment model into the CA modeling framework. We propose a bi-level algorithm to solve the model, where the upper level optimizes the hybrid design by exploiting some analytical properties of the CA model, and the lower level calculates the route assignment equilibrium.Numerical experiments show that the optimal hybrid design outperforms the conventional transit design for a wide range of operating conditions. The cost saving can be over 20%. Under certain conditions, the hybrid design can even reduce the total operating cost, making bike-sharing profitable for transit agencies. The practical applicability of our model is demonstrated via a case study of a real bus line in Chengdu, China.

Analysis of Aerial Ropeways by following various Indian and International Codes for Urban Mobility with some Structural Modifications in Monocable Ropeways to make it Safe, Secure, Economical and all Weather Durable

Cable-propelled transit’ (CPT), in particular detachable aerial ropeways are widely employed as transportation systems in alpine areas. In recent years, these transport systems have also been increasingly used in urban areas and are no longer a niche public transportation technology (Hoffmann 2006, Alshalalfah, Shalaby, and Dale 2014). Cable cars systems compete with performance characteristics of other more common urban transport technologies and have the potential to enhance the existing transport provision in cities (O'Connor and Dale 2011). While many applications can be found as transportation systems in airport facilities, and to provide access to tourist attractions, several metropolitan areas have even incorporated gondolas and aerial tramways into their public transport networks. This paper focuses on aerial ropeway systems that operate as a mass transit service (similar to buses, BRT, LRT, etc.) and are part of the public transit systems in their respective cities. Therefore, the analysis and case studies presented in the paper concern systems that are used as a public transit service

Comparative analysis on access and egress distances for Semi BRT Trans ‘Mamminasata’ and Commuter Train ‘SUSI’

The existence of the Semi Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Network and the Commuter Train Network, as part of Urban Mass Transportation is developed with the aim of providing better service on commuter trips. To estimate passenger demands on new mass transit services, especially in areas without prior service, Access and Egress distances data are needed to design an appropriate mass transit. This underlies the reason why a comparative analysis of Access and Egress distance of BRT Trans ‘Mamminasata’ in Makassar and Commuter Train Surabaya – Sidoarjo was necessarily done. Which of the two had further Access or Egress distance; was it the BRT Trans ‘Mamminasata’ Makassar or the Commuter train Surabaya-Sidoarjo? Data were obtained through interviews and data management from related department. The results found that both Access and Egress of the BRT Trans ‘Mamminasata’ in Makassar was shorter than the Commuter Train Surabaya-Sidoarjo.

Gender, kitchen resources and students’ academic performance and retention in thermochemistry in Cross River State, Nigeria

This paper studies the destination information marketing as an aid to the Cross River Tourism bid. A questionnaire was designed to elicit responses from the stakeholders in the tourism industry. Out of 69 questionnaire copies administered on tourist and workers in three popular hotels in Calabar (University of Calabar Hotel, Marian hotel and the Transcorp, Calabar) 50 unusable copies were retrieved and used in the analyses. The findings showed a predominance of domestic tourists in Cross River State. The sites/events most frequently visited included Christmas Festival, Obudu Mountain Race, Tinapa Holiday/Business Resort, Obudu Mountain Resort, Marina Resort (Water Front) and Leboku New Yam Festival. The single bedroom accommodation and double rooms are the most preferred accommodations. The most preferred tourist means of transportation included public mass transit, chartered taxis and car hire services. The most popular sources of tourism information in Cross River State were tourist guide books, internet and the Tourism Bureau. The most preferred souvenirs on Cross River State included indigenous art works and utilities. The most frequent complaint of tourists was the bad state of the roads. The most frequent complementary remarks were: “the state is very clean and beautiful”, “the people are very friendly”; “the state is very, very peaceful”. Suggestions were given for improvement. Keywords: Marketing, Destination Information, Tourism Driven Economy, Cross River State

Cubular Corridors: Vertical Urbanism's Intersection with Accessibility Imperatives

Transportation network improvements have only marginal impacts unless either land use policies or transportation measures take seemingly costly directions, such as increasing mass transit service frequency, or by imposing additional fuel taxes or implementing costly congestion pricing to use a Corridor. Alternatively, radical initiatives such as the sale of public lands to an enterprise with a transportation authority component to develop transit-surrounding parcels (or sell them to the private sector for development), repurposing of brownfields or implementing performance zoning standards, will spur denser land development. Despite these realities, the public’s focus on increasing accessibility opportunities is focused, incorrectly I believe, on implementing devices relying on technological advances from artificial intelligence (AI) to the burgeoning Internet of Things (using 4 and 5G platforms) to move travelers faster and less stressfully. Focus on regional planning, especially, goes missing from this current environment. Initially in this paper, I review the nature of the traffic problems affecting heavily-traveled arterial streets in urban cores today, referring to these key rights of way as “Corridors” throughout this paper. Next, I explain why towns cannot bank on transportation infrastructure planning being “left up to AI and the IoT environment.” Then, I outline 10 “cubular” principles of land planning for communities grappling with Corridor gridlock and other issues affecting the quality of life from poor movement of motorized devices, velocipedes and persons walking alongside city streets. These principles are sensible when imagining Corridors in their three dimensions, adopting a sort of new “vertical urbanism,” where major thoroughfares insinuate themselves into the core areas of our planning landscapes.

A Parallel Transportation Management and Control System for Bus Rapid Transit Using the ACP Approach

Bus rapid transit (BRT) has been proved to be an effective tool to improve mass transit services. However, BRT's adaptive operations like management and scheduling under different scenarios are too complicated to implement using traditional methods. The ACP approach, which is based on holism and complex system theory and consists of artificial systems (A), computational experiments (C) and parallel execution (P), offers an efficient new method to cope with these complex systems, including BRT. In this paper, the parallel transportation management and control system for BRT (PTMS-BRT) is presented, which is designed and implemented using the ACP approach. PTMS-BRT integrates such functions as BRT's monitoring, warning, forecasting, incident management, and real-time scheduling, to provide its operations smoother, safer, more efficient, and reliable. It has been piloted successfully in Guangzhou BRT to demonstrate it as another successful example of parallel transportation systems.

System Proposal for Mass Transit Service Quality Control Based on GPS Data.

Quality is an essential aspect of public transport. In the case of regular public passenger transport by road, punctuality and regularity are criteria used to assess quality of service. Calculating metrics related to these criteria continuously over time and comprehensively across the entire transport network requires the handling of large amounts of data. This article describes a system for continuously and comprehensively monitoring punctuality and regularity. The system uses location data acquired continuously in the vehicles and automatically transferred for analysis. These data are processed intelligently by elements that are commonly used by transport operators: GPS-based tracking system, onboard computer and wireless networks for mobile data communications. The system was tested on a transport company, for which we measured the punctuality of one of the routes that it operates; the results are presented in this article.

Benchmarking and improving mass transit systems in the United States based on best-in class practices

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to find ways to develop more efficient mass transit systems across the USA and, thus, make the best use of state/federal/municipal government funds and taxpayers’ monies. This paper conducts benchmarking studies. In doing so, this paper identifies the best-in class mass transit practices that every regional mass transit system can emulate.Design/methodology/approachThe continuous underutilization of a mass transit system can increase public scrutiny concerning the increased investment in mass transit services. To defuse such scrutiny, this paper analyzes the past (in year 2011) performances of 515 mass transit agencies in the USA using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Also, to identify which factors influences those performances, the authors paired DEA scores for transit efficiency at the state level against a set of independent variables using a special form of regression analysis called Tobit regression.FindingsThe authors found that the greater population density of the service area, the greater number of riders can be served in a short amount of distance and time. Also, the authors discovered that the transportation mode of mass transit services could affect mass transit efficiency. On the other hand, the authors found no evidence indicating that the public ownership or private operation of transit systems could make any differences in the transit efficiency.Originality/valueThis paper is one of the few that assessed the performance of mass transit systems in comparison to their peers using a large-scale data and identify the leading causes of mass transit inefficiency. Thus, this paper helps transit authorities in handling juggling acts of protecting the conflicting interests of government policy makers against the general public and, then, make sensible future investment decisions.

Data-enabled public preferences inform integration of autonomous vehicles with transit-oriented development in Atlanta

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have emerged as a transformative technology with the potential to both fundamentally improve lives in cities but also to exacerbate suburban sprawl, vehicle miles traveled and the associated greenhouse gas emissions. Are communities willing to adopt best practices that can lead to early adoption of more sustainable outcomes? This paper presents innovative means to analyze social preferences, demand for AVs, and the potential to resolve community concerns with integrated solutions. We discuss our comprehensive analysis of unstructured and structured data from a survey on AVs that was conducted by the Atlanta Regional Commission in 2015. We used topic modeling to synthesize the “topics” from 1540 comments. The topics captured Atlanta residents' concerns and suggestions about implementing AVs. Further, sentiment analysis revealed people's attitudes on the topics. Accordingly, we proposed an integration of AVs and transit-oriented development (TOD: the development of compact and mixed-use communities around high quality mass transit services within a 10-min walking distance). The second type of data is people's responses to multiple-choice questions about AVs and TOD, which we call structured data. Using latent-class analysis, we identified heterogeneity in preferences for AVs and TOD. More Atlanta residents are willing to live in transit-oriented communities than traditional automobile-dependent ones if AVs save time and improve productivity. This finding portends the future success of combining AVs with TOD and reaping the sustainable benefits of this transformative technology.

A decision support system for developing the managerial policy of urban paratransit services: A case study of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority

In the wake of the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) of 1990, paratransit services were offered to improve mobility, employment opportunities, and access to community services for individuals who are mentally or physically handicapped. Due to the complexity involved in ADA rules and transportation regulations as well as the customized, on-demand service requirements, paratransit services are far more costly to render than fixed-route based mass transit services. In times of ongoing budget crisis among public entities, many public transit authorities cope with a dilemma of meeting the growing demand and complex service requirements, while controlling rising paratransit costs. Considering this dilemma, this paper proposes a decision support system (DSS) that can aid the mass transit authority in evaluating paratransit service performance, while continually improving performance over time. To validate the usefulness of the proposed DSS, it has been applied to the actual case of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA).

Evaluating the Role of Mass Transit and its Effect on Fuel Efficiency in the Kumasi Metropolis, Ghana

The priority of every government is to develop the economy of its country to raise the living standard of the citizenry. Mass transit system plays a vital role in this quest. The energy demand within the transport subsector is immense. Indeed Ghana subsidises petroleum products by GH¢45 million monthly and the government of Ghana is faced with the dilemma of whether or not this subsidy be removed as it is putting pressure on national budget. For this reason the need for energy efficiency management has become imperative. This study assessed the role of mass transit in urban transportation system and how it affects energy demand. Secondary data was used for the study. The study revealed that the use of mass transit would reduce energy demand within the transport sector due to its fuel efficiency potentials. Therefore expanding the intra-city mass transit services within Kumasi Metropolis could offer one of the most effective, efficient and feasible strategy for improving fuel efficiency within the transport sub sector. Therefore policy decision should give attention to metro mass transit services within metropolitan areas.