Planning Bus Systems for Mega-Cities: A Case Study for Beijing

This paper presents and tests a method to design hierarchical bus networks for large-scale polycentric urban areas. The method produces conceptual plans based on geometric idealizations of regional networks intended to serve medium-distance trips, and then adapts such conceptual plans into implementable designs. Also considered are a supportive backbone system for long distance trips and a last-mile system for local trips. The focus is the medium distance system since this system is not well understood for megacities. Mathematical optimization is used to develop the regional plans. The objective function is composed of analytic formulae for a concept’s agency and user costs. These formulae include as decision variables each network’s total service distance, the total number of stops, and the service headway. The proposed method is applied to Beijing, China. The proposed solution includes 6531 km of directional bus service routes and 4825 stops, uses about 6243 vehicles and costs 1.43 million CNY/h to run, and yet the target passengers’ average door-to-door travel time is approximately 53.6 min. These numbers are considerable improvements. They are, respectively, about 53% of the agency cost currently used to provide bus service, and 79% of the current passenger travel time experienced in Beijing.

• Record URL:
  https://annualmeeting.mytrb.org/OnlineProgram/Details/15911
• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AEP40 Standing Committee on Transportation Network Modeling.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  ,    
• Authors:
  • Liu, Xuejie
  • Zhu, Jiazheng
  • Ma, Tengteng
  • Ouyang, Yanfeng
  • Daganzo, Carlos F
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 100th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2021-1-5 to 2021-1-29
• Date: 2021

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bus routes; Bus stops; Bus transit; Case studies; Costs; Optimization; Travel time; Urban areas
• Geographic Terms: Beijing (China)
• Subject Areas: Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01763921
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: TRBAM-21-03961
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 4 2021 10:57AM