No abstract

No abstract

As part of efforts to promote sustainable mobility, many cities are currently experiencing the rapid expansion of their metro network. The consequent growth in ridership motivates a broad range of travel demand management (TDM) policies, both in terms of passenger flow control and dynamic pricing strategies. This work aims to reveal the impact of TDM on metro commuters' behavioural loyalty using stated preference data collected in Guangzhou, China. Commuters' behavioural response to TDM strategies is investigated in terms of the possible shift in departure time and travel mode. A hybrid choice model framework is used to incorporate four latent variables of interest, i.e., service quality, overall impression, external attractiveness and switching cost, into the discrete choice model and thereby capture the relationships between the attitudinal factors and observed variables. The model estimation results indicate that the four latent variables all prove useful in interpreting commuters' behavioural loyalty. Commuters' perceived service quality and overall impression both show a positive effect on their willingness to continue travelling by metro and are thus instructive for ridership retention. External attractiveness is found to be significant only in the case of the tendency to shift to a private car. Switching costs reveal commuters' emotional attachment to their already developed commuting habit. These insights into commuters' behavioural change intention enable metro operators to enhance commuters' loyalty to their service and develop more effective TDM strategies in future practice. Keywords behavioural change • nested logit model • attitude • factor analysis • SP-off-RP survey • urban rail transitSection 5 reports the model estimation results and discusses the policy implications. In the last section, the conclusions drawn from the above content are summarised, and directions for future work are discussed.

The acceleration of the motorization process creates severe environmental problems by affecting the energy consumption of urban traffic. As a major source of traffic pollution, vehicle exhaust deserves more attention when making traffic policy. Actually, the acceleration, deceleration, and idling conditions of vehicles cause more pollution than usual, which mainly happens at intersections of the road network. Besides, in the context of giving priority on public transport development, bus signal priority (BSP) at intersections becomes a quite prevalent measure to reduce average capita delay for travelers, while long-term practice also indicates that the unreasonable setting of bus lane further worsens the running conditions for other vehicles by occupying excessive traffic capacity, which highlights the indirect environmental effects of BSP. This paper provides a simulation-based method for evaluating the adaptability of BSP to find an optimum balance between efficient and environmental care. Specifically, the traffic volume, bus mixed rate of the intersection and energy types of vehicles consist of hybrid energy consumption conditions collectively. A VSP (vehicle specific power)-based exhaust emission models for both buses and other vehicles are employed to estimate the environmental cost of the entire intersection. Moreover, the overall efficiency of gasoline and electric vehicles is further evaluated to offer more implications for traffic control practice.

No abstract

Recently, surges of passengers caused by large gatherings, temporary traffic control measures, or other abnormal events have frequently occurred in metro systems. From the standpoint of the operation managers, the available information about these outside events is incomplete or delayed. Unlike regular peaks of commuting, those unforeseen surges pose great challenges to emergency organization and safety management. This study aims to assist managers in monitoring passenger flow in an intelligent manner so as to react promptly. Compared with the high cost of deploying multisensors, the widely adopted automated fare collection (AFC) system provides an economical solution for inflow monitoring from the application point of view. In this paper, a comprehensive framework for the early warning mechanism is established, including four major phases: data acquisition, preprocessing, off-line modeling, and on-line detection. For each station, passengers’ tapping-on records are gathered in real time, to be further transformed into a dynamic time series of inflow volumes. Then, a sequence decomposition model is formulated to highlight the anomaly by removing its inherent disturbances. Furthermore, a novel hybrid anomaly detection method is developed to monitor the variation of passenger flow, in which the features of inflow patterns are fully considered. The proposed method is tested by a numerical experiment, along with a real-world case study of Guangzhou metro. The results show that, for most cases, the response time for detection is within 5 min, which makes the surge phenomenon observable at an early stage and reminds managers to make interventions appropriately.

No abstract

This is a repository copy of Time-dependent pricing strategies for metro lines considering peak avoidance behaviour of commuters.