Rail Line Length in an Urban Transportation Corridor

Abstract

The length of a rail line that will minimize total transportation (user and operator) costs, and the threshold demand necessary to ensure that the resulting length of the rail line is nonzero are investigated for an urban transportation corridor. A density of demand for travel to the central business district (CBD) represented by a general function P(x) passengers per unit length of the corridor where x is the distance from the CBD is considered. The line-cost as a function of x, the costs of the rail fleet, rail and bus operating costs and passenger time costs are also considered in the formulation. The fleet size is formulated considering the peaking of demand relative to time. When the line cost is nonuniform there could be several line lengths at which the total transportation cost is minimized or even maximized locally. When the line cost per unit length is uniform, a minimum transport cost rail line of nonzero length exists only if the net gain in travel time and operating cost of transporting the total ridership a unit distance by rail, when compared to bus, exceeds the marginal line and fleet costs per unit length. In either case, the minimum transport cost rail line length can be determined easily. The effects on the line length of shifts in demand are investigated. Closed-form solutions for the line length are obtained for the cases of sectorial and rectangular corridor-sheds with uniformly distributed demand per unit area.

Financial sustainability of rail transit service: The effect of urban development pattern

“…The primary objective of the rail service operator is to minimize the total cost TC (or maximize operating profits) by optimizing the rail service's planning and operation, including average station spacing s, number of rail stations N, and the service headway h. Many research papers in the literature (Laporte et al, 2005;Spasovic et al, 1994;Wirasinghe and Seneviratne, 1986) focus on the optimization of public transit operation strategies in order to achieve certain objective of operators. These decision variables determine the rail service performance and affect both the revenue and operating costs.…”

A bilevel model for optimizing station locations along a rail transit line

“…The approach to solve the problem was to develop an analytical model to minimize the travel time and the operating costs by considering a rectangular grid, which is not applicable in practical life. Wirasinghe and Seneviratne [3] tried to optimize rail line length in an urban transportation corridor by minimizing total transportation costs. Formulation of the various cost components, e.g., user and operator costs were described vividly in their study.…”

“…The clusters are obtained by minimizing the variance of the total population of the two subgroups at the lower level. We find out the centroids of these two subgroups, which are represented by C 1 consisting of the clusters of P 1 , P 2 , P 3 and P 4 and C 2 consisting of the clusters of P 5 , P 6 and P 7 . The populations of the two clusters are 50,000 and 47,000 respectively.…”

Analysis of flows and speeds of urban transit systems for consideration of modal transition in a corridor

“…There is a substantial amount of peerreviewed literature on the general design and optimization of transit service in a given corridor [5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. The relationship between rail line location within a corridor and land use was explored in [3] and, [12]. On that basis, the establishment of the optimal termini locations and pre-calculation of the line extensions with future land use changes for a rail line within a corridor at a given time were investigated.…”