A Self-Adjusting Method to Resist Bus Bunching Based on Boarding Limits

Abstract

Bus bunching is one of the most serious problems of urban bus systems. Bus bunching increases waiting and travel time of passengers. Many bus systems use schedules to reach equal headways. Compared to the idea of schedules and the target headway introduced later, we propose a new method to improve the efficiency of a bus system and avoid bus bunching by boarding limits. Our solution can be effectively implemented when buses cannot travel as planned because of bad road conditions and dynamic demands at bus stops. Besides, using our method, bus headways reach the state with equal headways dynamically and spontaneously without drivers’ explicit intervention. Moreover, the method can improve the level of the bus service and reduce total travel time of passengers. We verify our method using an ideal bus route and a real bus route, both showing the success of the proposed method.

Intelligent Buses in a Loop Service: Emergence of No-Boarding and Holding Strategies

“…e popular method to stabilise the buses' headways is to implement a holding strategy [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] which slows down a fast bus if its headway with respect to the bus ahead of it is deemed to be too small. Other approaches include stop-skipping [11, [22][23][24][25][26] or deadheading (i.e., sending an empty bus directly to a set of designated bus stops) [23,[26][27][28][29], limiting boarding [30][31][32][33][34][35], as well as despatching buses with wide doors [36][37][38].…”

“…In contrast to the majority of studies focusing on holding back buses, relatively fewer studies explored the opposite, viz. a no-boarding strategy [30][31][32][33][34][35]: a slow bus would always allow passengers to alight at a bus stop, but would disallow boarding and leave the bus stop if it is too slow in order to speed it up. Preliminary work by Delgado et al [30] argued that this is a viable strategy to improve the bus system, mainly by carrying out extensive simulations.…”

Reliability Optimization Model of Stop-Skipping Bus Operation with Capacity Constraints

“…ey provided a potential to maintain system stability under the influence of uncertain information. Holding strategy is one of the control approaches, which balances the headway of buses and thus provides provide reliable service [21,22]. Daganzo [23] adopted a time control point strategy to achieve regular headways and, based on real-time information, determined bus holding times at a time control points.…”

“…: (a) the load of bus does not reach the vehicle capacity when bus i dispatched from stop 푗 퐿 푖,푗 ≤ 푄 푐 , and at this time, all arriving passengers can board the bus; (b) the load of bus reaches the vehicle capacity during a serving time (퐿 푖,푗−1 + 퐴 + 푖,푗 − 푁 − 푖,푗 ≥ 푄 푐 ), and at this time, part of arriving passengers during a stop service interval can board the bus; (c) the load of bus reaches the vehicle capacity during a holding time (퐿 푖,푗−1 + 퐴 + 푖,푗 + 퐴 ℎ+ 푖,푗 − 푁 − 푖,푗 ≥ 푄 푐 ≥ 퐿 푖,푗−1 +퐴 + 푖,푗 − 푁 − 푖,푗 ), and at this time all arriving passengers during a stop service interval and part of the arriving passengers during a holding time can board the bus. us, the waiting time of in-vehicle passengers to departure during a dwell time 퐼푁푆 푖,푗can be calculated by(21) …”

Multiobjective Optimal Formulations for Bus Fleet Size of Public Transit under Headway-Based Holding Control

“…Ibarra-Rojas et al [1] provided an excellent summary of the previous work on realtime headway control strategies. In terms of spatial configuration, different control strategies can be classified into two categories: station control, including holding strategies [2][3][4] and stop-skipping strategies [5][6][7], and interstation control, including bus speed regulation strategies [8] and traffic signal priority strategies [9][10][11]. In addition, two control methods can be integrated to regulate bus headways or optimize operations of public transport systems [12][13][14][15][16].…”