Abstract

The reliability of transit modes is a crucial issue to guarantee their competitiveness and attractiveness. Experience shows that buses covering busy lines with short headways tend to arrive irregularly at their stops, often in bunches and therefore remarkably affecting the service. Hence, this work presents a stochastic model capable of representing the operational activity of a bus transit network and the service disruptions which eventually end up causing deviations from desired schedule. At the same time, the model is tested on an ideal route as a decision making tool.

Abstract

Popularity of shared vehicle systems in recent years makes necessary to stablish a design criteria in order to adapt those system to larger scales. Probably, the biggest problem to face is rebalancing. Present work stablishes an optimization method of those rebalancing operations, in particular for a bike-sharing system. In order to do this, two different methods are defined: periodic (or static) rebalancing and continuous (or dynamic) rebalancing. Results show that periodic rebalancing is more efficient but the level of service achieved is strongly capped by station size and bike fleet. On the other hand, continuous rebalancing is less efficient but allows a way higher level of service. For that reason, both rebalancing modes are complementary and necessary in order to reach a better level of service and lower costs than the current performance. La popularidad que han adquirido los sistemas de vehículos compartidos en los últimos años ha hecho que sea necesario establecer una serie de criterios de diseño para poder adaptar estos sistemas a mayor escala. Probablemente el mayor problema de estos sistemas es el reposicionamiento. En el presente trabajo se pretende establecer un método de optimización de dichas operaciones de reposicionamiento, concretamente para el caso de bicicletas compartidas. Esta optimización se lleva a cabo a dos niveles: reposicionamiento periódico y continuo. Los resultados demuestran que el reposicionamiento periódico resulta más eficiente, pero el nivel de servicio que ofrece queda muy limitado por el tamaño de las estaciones. Por otro lado, el reposicionamiento continuo resulta menos eficiente pero puede alcanzar un nivel de servicio mucho mayor que el periódico. Por tanto, ambos modos son complementarios y necesarios para alcanzar mejores niveles de servicio o costes menores que los del actual servicio.

Abstract

For long time, most of the big cities have serious problems of congestion in the streets because of the high use of private vehicles, which means also more pollution and traffic accidents, among others. Therefore, for over many years ago and up to nowadays has been investigating in order to improve the quality and service of the public transportation and thus make it more attractive for the people. Since the people spend very much time going to work, university, etc., a very important aspect for the traveller is his travel time. This includes the time going to and from the bus stop, waiting and travel time. These times may be optimized and reduced with and effective route and with a good commercial speed of the bus as well. This project is focused on investigating some aspects of transport engineering of the urban bus route number 43 of the city of Kaunas, Lithuania. In order to do it, the study is performed for several time periods in a weekday and on Saturday. The research intends to analyze four factors: the speed of the vehicle along the route, the passenger’s flow, the passenger travel distance and the passenger travel time. In the experimental research it is obtained data of passengers flow throughout the route; and, in order to get data of bus speed we have a GPS which is able to store files at high frequency. The results indicate that the vehicle speed is not affected by the load; however it might be significant when comparing average bus speeds of the streets. The calculations give an average travel distance on the vehicle equal to 4,79 km and an average travel time - including walking and waiting time - nearly 24 minutes. About passengers’ flows, they are localized in a small time interval during the morning peak time. However, in the afternoon the passengers come back home during more prolonged time and often without peaks of flow. Outgoing

Abstract

Demand Responsive Transportation (DRT) is currently growing in our cities as shared ride-hailing services operated by private companies, providing a hybrid service between the bus and the taxi. Like DRT, these new on-demand services could be used to feed and complement the public transport, and additionally, their flexibility might bring other market opportunities, beneficial to cities and metropolitan areas. However, the true potential of them, as well as the recognition of the service requirements depending on the type of user and use case, remains unstudied. Hence, the aim of this research is to identify user requirements and market opportunities, from the case study conducted with the participation of 1211 users of the MOIA service test in Hanover, to contribute to the successful design of this new generation of DRT. Results indicate a high interest in using MOIA for leisure trips, identify the highest intention of use of the service within suburban areas, and recognise a different behaviour, both in the intention of use and for user requirements, depending on the age of the users and the usage frequency. Peer Reviewed