To increase or to decrease the price? Managing public transport queues during COVID-19 in the presence of strategic commuters

The impact of COVID-19 on urban travel behavior has been unprecedented. It has significantly influenced the travel mode choices of different urban commuters in various countries across the globe. Given that the public transport providers need to tradeoff between minimizing the spread of COVID-19 and providing an affordable travel choice in this environment, we develop a strategic queueing model to analyze the effect of different pricing strategies on the commuter behavior. In particular, we consider a Markovian queue in front of a public transport ticket counter wherein strategic commuters arrive at the service facility and make joining or balking decisions based on their derived utilities. In contrast to conventional wisdom, we suggest that the public transport provider needs to decrease the price to filter out the wealthy commuters who possess feasible alternative travel options from using public transport and promote the commuters with no alternatives in using public transport.

• Record URL:
  • https://doi.org/10.1007/s12469-022-00314-3
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/1866749X
• Supplemental Notes:
  • © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
• Authors:
  • Srinivas, S Srivatsa
  • 0000-0003-1169-2666
• Publication Date: 2023-3

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: References;
• Pagination: pp 275-285
• Serial:
  • Public Transport
  • Volume: 15
  • Issue Number: 1
  • Publisher: Springer Publishing
  • ISSN: 1866-749X
  • EISSN: 1613-7159
  • Serial URL: http://link.springer.com/journal/12469

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Commuters; COVID-19; Fares; Public transit; Queuing
• Subject Areas: Finance; Operations and Traffic Management; Public Transportation; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01881109
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Apr 25 2023 9:49AM