Get on board: Assessing an all-door boarding pilot project in Montreal, Canada

Abstract

Transit agencies often focus on developing strategies aimed at reducing travel time to increase passengers' satisfaction. One strategy used by transit agencies to reduce passenger activity time, and accordingly travel times, is the implementation of all-door boarding -a service allowing transit users to board and alight vehicles through any door. The present study uses data collected in Montreal, Canada, to assess the impacts of an all-door boarding pilot project from two points of view: (1) operationally through passenger activity time, and (2) by assessing passenger satisfaction. Operationally, the results reveal that when compared to a similar bus route that does not allow all-door boarding, the all-door boarding strategy shows a savings of five percent in passenger activity time at regular stops, while time savings at high passenger activity stops such as metro stations experienced time savings of around 19 percent. Thus, savings are maximized at stops with high passenger demand. Additionally, with regard to user perceptions, the results reveal that passengers who use the all-door boarding service are more satisfied with bus service, particularly with on time performance. Overall, the results of this study demonstrate that all-door boarding is an effective strategy to improve the quality of service due to the associated time savings and increased customer satisfaction. Finally, the study offers important recommendations to transit planners and policy makers to effectively implement and maximize the benefits of an all-door boarding policy based on statistical analysis and on-site observations.

No-boarding buses: Synchronisation for efficiency

“…Alternatively, a study which combined holding and stop-skipping strategies found this to be undesirable as such tight controls may induce poorer performance [28]. Perhaps a worthy way forward is to have buses with wide doors or "no doors" [29][30][31], so that multiple passengers may simultaneously board and alight as compared to queuing through a single narrow entry. However, this would risk other issues like fare evasion.…”

Bus bunching as a synchronisation phenomenon

“…Buses arriving at bus stops in bunches forces commuters to face extended waiting times; and whilst indubitably undesirable, such occurrences are stable [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. Bus bunching is a physical phenomenon of a complex socio-technological system.…”

“…Although many of the previous work on this subject had identified this problem and the inevitable occurrence of bunching [14-16, 18, 20], we have not encountered an approach based on a physical mechanism for synchronisation of coupled oscillators. Instead, some research dealt with potential strategies towards nullifying bus bunching by holding or delaying some buses, with some extending to adaptive and dynamic controls according to real-time situations [17, 19, 21-23, 29, 31], as well as exploring the effects of buses with wide doors [24,25,30] or engineering the locations of bus stops along the bus routes [27].…”

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].…”