Improving high-frequency bus service reliability through better scheduling

Developing a schedule for high-frequency bus routes involves balancing the costs to the passengers in terms of passenger waiting time and in-vehicle time and the cost to the transit agency. Passengers are interested in short travel times and in short and reliable waiting times. In order to assess the trade-off between trip speed and reliability, transit planners need to follow a clear scheduling process; i.e., a series of steps the scheduler follows to create a schedule. This thesis develops a scheduling process based on a model which explicitly projects and evaluates the tradeoffs between overall travel time and reliability. The model uses Automatic Vehicle Location and Automatic Passenger Count data and is based on two critical hypotheses: (i) consecutive bus vehicle trips are independent and (ii) consecutive segment running times for a particular bus trips are independent. These two hypotheses will not be true in all cases but were shown to be true on the two CTA bus routes analyzed, 95E and 85. By simulating the running time distributions and headway variability of any proposed schedule, the model estimates the cost of the schedule for waiting passengers, onboard passengers and the transit agency.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Fattouche, Grâce

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nigel H.M. Wilson and John P. Attanucci.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38954

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38954