Optimal Zone Design for Feeder Transit Services

Abstract

Feeder transit services generally operate within residential service areas and move customers to and from a transfer point that connects to a major fixed-route transit network. Feeders can operate in a traditional fixed-route or in an emerging demand-responsive fashion. In designing such systems, planners may divide the entire service area into zones independently served by a single feeder line to provide better customer service, lower operating cost, and make management of the operations easier. An analytical model is developed to help decision makers determine the number of zones in a residential service area while balancing customer service quality and vehicle operating costs. For fixed-route and demand-responsive feeder transit, closed-form expressions and numerical procedures are used to derive the optimal number of zones as a function of the main parameters. Analytical expressions are validated by simulation runs.

How Have Travelers Changed Mode Choices for First/Last Mile Trips after the Introduction of Bicycle-Sharing Systems: An Empirical Study in Beijing, China

“…As a result, the first/last mile problem is common due to the limited connectivity and flexibility of traditional public transit. Numerous researches on transit network design integrating flexible transit with fixed-route transit [8][9][10][11] have been carried out and flexible transit services have been applied to offer alternatives for first/last mile feeder services [11]. However, from the environmental and economical perspective, bike-and-ride seems to offer the most cost-effectiveness and long-term potential to the park-and-ride and feeder bus [12].…”

Flexible transit routing model considering passengers’ willingness to pay

“…In recent years, flexible transit services have been recognized as one potential solution under medium-demand or low-demand conditions in newly developed urban/suburban areas [10], [14], [15]. Quadrifoglio and Li [16] analyzed the optimal number of zones in designing feeder bus services using fixed-route and demand-responsive services. They provided a closed-form solution for regular services and an approximation formula for flexible services.…”

A Threshold Policy for Dispatching Vehicles in Demand-responsive Transit Systems

“…The aforementioned simulation was widely applied to analyse various aspects of flexible transit systems. For example, simulation was employed to validate analytical models for (a) deriving the critical demand density for operating feeder transit services (Quadrifoglio and Li [22]), (b) determining the optimal design of feeder service zones (Li and Quadrifoglio [23,24]), and (c) estimating the optimal cycle length of demand-responsive feeder transit services (Chandra and Quadrifoglio [25]). Comprehensive simulation studies were also conducted to (a) evaluate the effect of emerging technologies on operations of paratransit systems vehicles which collect passengers at the terminal and deliver them to their home locations.…”