A Hierarchical Public Transit Network Design Method for Large Networks

Designing an efficient public transit network suitable for passengers, operators and the authorities is difficult to achieve due to their conflicting objectives. The purpose of this study is to come up with a hierarchical public transit network design which can satisfy the needs of three stakeholders. The public transit network design and frequency setting problem comprises of discovering an objective specific set of routes and its associated frequencies. Due to its vast search space and multiple constraints, this problem is extremely challenging to solve. Therefore, a heuristic methodology is proposed, where first shortest paths are calculated to create routes and categorized into demand based hierarchical route categories (trunk and feeder). Later a route set is created by selecting routes from different route categories. Initially, minimum route overlapping is allowed for trunk route selection but for feeder route selection, the overlapping constraint is relaxed to include more routes. At the end, the final route set is subjected to feasibility criteria and only feasible route set is allowed for the evaluation. The evaluation is composed of performance indicators representing viewpoints of all three stakeholders. The numerical experiments are performed on benchmark networks of Mumford. The results show that the methodology produced consistent, high-quality results for varied demand and large networks. The results also show that the proposed solution methodology produced the best average travel times, smallest transit network length and minimum unused offered transit capacity. The developed methodology can assist planners in creating better public transit networks.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP025 Standing Committee on Public Transportation Planning and Development.
• Authors:
  • Ul Abedin, Zain
  • Rau, Andreas
  • Busch, Fritz
  • Wang, David Z W
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 16p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Design; Heuristic methods; Methodology; Networks; Public transit; Routes; Shortest path algorithms; Stakeholders; Travel demand; Travel time
• Subject Areas: Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01663529
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-02604
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 22 2018 11:54AM