The perception of Bus Rapid Transit: a passenger survey from Beijing Southern Axis BRT Line 1

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has emerged as a cost-effective transport system for urban mobility. As a relatively new form of Mass Transit, its ability to provide a high-quality transport service and potential to stimulate land development remain largely unexplored. This study intends to investigate the public attitude towards BRT services, as well as respondents’ perception of living near BRT stations, using the Beijing Southern Axis BRT system as a case study. A data-set of responses to 525 questionnaires were assembled and analysed using a combination of statistical techniques. The results show that BRT has gained great popularity among passengers, and brought about a positive impact on the attractiveness of residential property. The data identify that the majority of passengers are work-related commuters and use BRT more than once a day. The captive users have a higher satisfaction than choice users with respect to reliability, comfort & cleanliness and overall satisfaction with the BRT service. It is argued that the BRT has significantly improved the attractiveness of residential property along the BRT corridor.     

Traffic noise studies in a tropical environment

This paper reports upon a survey of traffic noise annoyance in three residential districts of Trinidad, West Indies. Householder perceptions were solicited by means of a questionnaire survey and direct measurements of traffic noise levels were taken. The results were compared with surveys elsewhere. It was concluded that household status had little effect on annoyance perception, that at L₁₀ levels greater than 70 dB(A) at a dwelling facade the noise level is unacceptable. L₁₀ levels less than 65 dB(A) at the building facade are not perceived as annoying in the environment considered.     

Improving transportation service quality based on information fusion

How to improve transportation service quality and thus attract more passengers to use public transportation systems is an important concern for city governments around the world. In this study, we propose a novel information fusion model that addresses the dependent relationships among the various criteria for a method of non-additive weighted gap analysis aimed at evaluating and improving the service quality of transport systems. The hybrid model remedies prior shortcomings and should be more applicable to real-world situations. The proposed model is applied to a real case study of Taipei city bus companies to demonstrate its usefulness. The resulting analysis and the managerial applications for improving the bus service quality are also discussed with regards to the current policies of Taipei city.     

Implementation of interactive transit information kiosks at New York City transit facilities: Analysis of user utilization and lessons learned

Transit Traveler Information Systems (TTIS) comprise a wide range of technologies that transit agencies use to provide reliable and timely transit-related information to customers. The touch-screen interactive information kiosk is an example of these emerging TTIS technologies. This paper examines the implementation of interactive touch-screen information kiosks, known as “On the Go!” Touch-Screen Travel Stations, at Metropolitan Transportation Authority-New York City Transit (MTA-NYCT) facilities in 2011. It analyzes data from passenger intercept surveys, from the kiosks’ built-in application usage logs and from field observations to understand actual passenger utilization of the kiosks and to assess the implications for transit agencies. The field observations also made it possible to obtain a profile of kiosk users, which sheds light on the concept of the “digital divide.” The findings, presented as lessons learned, can help agencies elsewhere develop guidelines and effective strategies for implementing similar interactive transit information systems.     

User perspectives in public transport timetable optimisation

The present paper deals with timetable optimisation from the perspective of minimising the waiting time experienced by passengers when transferring either to or from a bus. Due to its inherent complexity, this bi-level minimisation problem is extremely difficult to solve mathematically, since timetable optimisation is a non-linear non-convex mixed integer problem, with passenger flows defined by the route choice model, whereas the route choice model is a non-linear non-continuous mapping of the timetable. Therefore, a heuristic solution approach is developed in this paper, based on the idea of varying and optimising the offset of the bus lines. Varying the offset for a bus line impacts the waiting time passengers experience at any transfer stop on the bus line.In the bi-level timetable optimisation problem, the lower level is a transit assignment calculation yielding passengers’ route choice. This is used as weight when minimising waiting time by applying a Tabu Search algorithm to adapt the offset values for bus lines. The updated timetable then serves as input in the following transit assignment calculation. The process continues until convergence.The heuristic solution approach was applied on the large-scale public transport network in Denmark. The timetable optimisation approach yielded a yearly reduction in weighted waiting time equivalent to approximately 45 million Danish kroner (9 million USD).     

Evaluating the effects of bus design on passenger flow: Is agent-based simulation a feasible approach?

In this paper, we propose an agent-based simulation approach that is capable of simulating the flow of passengers on board buses and at bus stops. The intention is that it will be applied during vehicle development to analyze how vehicle design affects passenger flow, and thus also how it affects system performance such as dwell time. In turn, this could aid the developers in making design decisions early in the development process. Besides introducing the simulation tool itself, the paper explores the realism of the data generated by the tool. A number of passenger flow experiments featuring a full-scale bus mockup and 50 participants were carried out. The setup of these experiments mirrored a number of ‘bus journeys’ (regarding vehicle design, number of passengers boarding/alighting at each stop and so on) that had previously been simulated using the simulation tool. When the data from the simulations were compared with the data from the passenger flow experiments, it could be concluded that the tool is indeed able to generate realistic passenger flows, although with some errors when a large number of passengers board/alight. The simulated dwell times were rationally affected by the tested bus layout aspects. It was concluded that the tool makes it possible to evaluate how variations in bus layouts affect passenger flow, providing data of sufficiently high quality to be useful in early phases of vehicle design.     

准点可靠公交系统建设策略探讨

大多数城市中,公交车普遍存在可靠性不高的现象,提出可靠的公交这一理念,分析公交运行可靠性的影响因素,给出改进措施,保证公交在线路运行上的优先性,达到准点可靠,提高公交效率的目的。     

Understanding the impacts of a combination of service improvement strategies on bus running time and passenger’s perception

Transit agencies implement many strategies in order to provide an attractive transportation service. This article aims to evaluate the impacts of implementing a combination of strategies, designed to improve the bus transit service, on running time and passenger satisfaction. These strategies include using smart card fare collection, introducing limited-stop bus service, implementing reserved bus lanes, using articulated buses, and implementing transit signal priority (TSP). This study uses stop-level data collected from the Société de transport de Montréal (STM)’s automatic vehicle location (AVL) and automatic passenger count (APC) systems, in Montréal, Canada. The combination of these strategies has lead to a 10.5% decline in running time along the limited stop service compared to the regular service. The regular route running time has increased by 1% on average compared to the initial time period. The study also shows that riders are generally satisfied with the service improvements. They tend to overestimate the savings associated with the implementation of this combination of strategies by 3.5-6.0 min and by 2.5-4.1 min for both the regular route and the limited stop service, respectively. This study helps transit planners and policy makers to better understand the effects of implementing a combination of strategies to improve running time and passenger’s perception of these changes in service.     

Analytical and simulation approaches to understand combined effects of transit signal priority and road-space priority measures

Transit signal priority (TSP) may be combined with road-space priority (RSP) measures to increase its effectiveness. Previous studies have investigated the combination of TSP and RSP measures, such as TSP with dedicated bus lanes (DBLs) and TSP with queue jump lanes (QJLs). However, in these studies, combined effects are usually not compared with separate effects of each measure. In addition, there is no comprehensive study dedicated to understanding combined effects of TSP and RSP measures. It remains unclear whether combining TSP and RSP measures creates an additive effect where the combined effect of TSP and RSP measures is equal to the sum of their separate effects. The existence of such an additive effect would suggest considerable benefits from combining TSP and RSP measures. This paper explores combined effects of TSP and RSP measures, including TSP with DBLs and TSP with QJLs. Analytical results based on time-space diagrams indicate that at an intersection level, the combined effect on bus delay savings is smaller than the additive effect if there is no nearside bus stop and the traffic condition in the base case is under-saturated or near-saturated. With a near-side bus stop, the combined effect on bus delay savings at an intersection level can be better than the additive effect (or over-additive effect), depending on dwell time, distance from the bus stop to the stop line, traffic demand, and cycle length. In addition, analytical results suggest that at an arterial level, the combined effect on bus delay savings can be the over-additive effect with suitable signal offsets. These results are confirmed by a micro-simulation case study. Combined effects on arterial and side-street traffic delays are also discussed.     

Continuous approximation for skip-stop operation in rail transit

Operating speed of a transit corridor is a key characteristic and has many consequences on its performance. It is generally accepted that an increased operating speed for a given fleet leads to reduced operating costs (per kilometer), travel and waiting times (three changes that can be computed precisely), an improved comfort and level of service, which can attract new passengers who are diverted from automobile (items harder to estimate precisely). That is why several operation schemes which aim to increase the operating speed are studied in the literature, such as deadheading, express services, and stop skipping.A novel category of solutions to this problem for one-way single-track rail transit is to perform accelerated transit operations with fixed stopping schedules. The concept is quite simple: as the time required for stopping at each station is an important part of travel time, reducing it would be a great achievement. Particular operations that take advantage of this idea already exist. This paper focuses on one of them: the skip-stop operation for rail transit lines using a single one-way track. It consists in defining three types of stations: AB stations where all the trains stop, and A and B stations where only half of the trains stop (stations type A and B are allocated interchangeably). This mode of operation is already described in the literature (Vuchic, 1973, Vuchic, 1976, Vuchic, 2005) and has been successfully implemented in the Metro system of Santiago, Chile.This work tackles the problem with a continuous approximation approach. The problem is described with a set of geographically dependent continuous parameters like the density of stations for a given line. Cost functions are built for a traditional (all-stop) operation and for skip-stop operation as described above. A simple example is presented to support this discussion. Finally, a discussion about the type of scenarios in which skip-stop operations are more beneficial is presented.