PASSENGER WAITING STRATEGIES FOR OVERLAPPING BUS ROUTES

Transit passengers in many urban areas must deal with overlapping bus routes with some routes sharing common stops. Such a passenger can decide either to board an arriving bus or wait for a faster bus - one which will have a shorter in-vehicle travel time. The purpose of this paper is to clarify this route-choice problem using mathematical formulations of passenger waiting times. First an analysis of previous research is carried out based on a field-verified formulation between the variance and the mean of the bus headway and on two headway distribution families. Second, probabilistic mathematical formulations are developed, and an interpretation of the problem is presented. In this second part, overlapping routes are categorized as slow or fast routes, and the proportion of passengers selecting each type of route is derived. The results concerning the route-choice strategies show that an optimal strategy might be to disregard an arriving slow bus. In this case the passenger should wait for a fast bus while disregarding slow buses arriving in the meantime.

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• Authors:
  • MARGUIER, PHJ
  • Ceder, Avishai (Avi)
• Publication Date: 1984-8

Media Info

• Features: References;
• Pagination: p. 207-230
• Serial:
  • Transportation Science
  • Volume: 18
  • Issue Number: 3
  • Publisher: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
  • ISSN: 0041-1655
  • Serial URL: http://transci.journal.informs.org/

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Behavior; Bus routes; Bus transportation; Express buses; Headways; Human factors engineering; Human factors engineering; Mathematical models; Mode choice; Probability; Psychology; Queuing theory; Research; Routes; Travel behavior; Waiting time
• Old TRIS Terms: Behavioral research; Modal selection; Overlap; Passenger waiting strategies; Queueing theory; Route analysis
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Design; Highways; Motor Carriers; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; Research; Safety and Human Factors; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00391560
• Record Type: Publication
• Source Agency: Engineering Index
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Jan 30 1985 12:00AM