ABSTRACT

Where private ridesharing companies such as Uber and Lyft are transforming the transit sector by making flexible transit cheaper and more readily available than ever before, it may be beneficial for public transportation agencies to adapt to the changing marketplace and provide flexible bus services in low to mid-demand density areas such as suburban or rural areas. This paper proposes an optimization model in which the service area for the flexible bus operations is jointly optimized with headways with time-dependent demand densities. The closed-form solution that minimizes the average costs of user and operator is obtained with analytic optimization. The model presented in this paper may be a helpful planning resource to determine the feasibility of flexible bus services where fixed-route transit operation is not desirable due to the lack of ridership, especially in suburban and rural regions. Numerical case studies and sensitivity analyses for critical operation factors are presented.

摘要

在Uber和Lyft之类的私人乘车共享公司通过比以往任何时候都更便宜和更容易获得灵活的公交服务而改变公交行业的地方，对于公共交通代理机构适应不断变化的市场并在中低端提供灵活的公交服务可能是有益的。 -需求密集的区域，例如郊区或农村地区。本文提出了一种优化模型，在该模型中，具有随时间变化的需求密度的车距联合优化了柔性公交车的服务区域。通过分析优化可以获得最小化用户和操作员平均成本的封闭式解决方案。本文提出的模型对于确定灵活公交服务的可行性可能是有用的规划资源，在这种情况下，由于缺乏乘车人而不能进行固定路线的公交运营，尤其是在郊区和农村地区。提出了数值案例研究和关键操作因素的敏感性分析。