The Across Latitudes and Cultures BRT Centre of Excellence is pleased to announce a monthly webinar series to share timely public transit research and encourage ongoing collaboration. The series is open to anyone and will address issues relevant to researchers and practitioners. Please share this announcement with your extended network.
The last webinar was:
How to Design Express Services on a Bus Transit Network
Presented by Homero Larrain, professor of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Friday, August 23rd, 2013 at 11am EDT
Register here
See summary, presentation and video below.
Please email Laurel at lpaget@uc.cl with any questions or future topic suggestions.
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How to Design Express Services on a Bus Transit Network
Express services (i.e. services that stop on a subset of the bus stops along their route) are a powerful strategy that can benefit both users and operators, due to a reduction in travel times (and hence in cycle times). Although these type of service can be found in more than 140 cities around the world, little is known about how to correctly design them, especially when taking bus capacity into consideration.
Our work introduces a methodology for solving the express service design problem on a bus transport network. A solution for this problem must take into account that buses have a maximum passenger capacity, and that users will minimize their expected travel times considering common lines and possible transfers. In this webinar, we will show how the design algorithm works, and we will share some results of its implementation on a simple network. For these preliminary tests we have found instances where savings in social costs rise to 30% when compared against a solution with no use of express services. We are currently developing a computational tool that will allow us to test this algorithm on larger networks.
Finally, we will also show the results we obtained for the Transbrasil corridor in Rio de Janeiro. Our model was able to highlight the flaws of the original solution and helped to design a new solution for the corridor.
