Traveler Willingness to Use Flexible Transit Services in China: Case Study of Qilu Software Park

Yu, Jie; Lu, Xiaolin; Pan, Shuliang; Guo, Chen

doi:10.1061/(asce)up.1943-5444.0000373

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Most of these studies revealed that flexible transit services are promising operating policies for shaping new travel patterns in low-demand areas and passengers are generally willing to use these innovative transit systems [7,8]. However, how to choose the most appropriate policy in a certain service area, especially between route deviation policy and point deviation policy, remains a challenge for transit operators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Methodology for Choosing between Route Deviation and Point Deviation Policies for Flexible Transit Services

Zheng

Qiu

2018

Journal of Advanced Transportation

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Flexible transit services, which bring together the characteristics of fixed-route transit and demand-responsive transit, have been proven to be cost-efficient in low-density residential areas. In this paper, a methodology is proposed to assist planners in making better decisions when choosing between route deviation policy and point deviation policy, which are two promising types of flexible transit services. A user cost function is developed to measure the service quality of the transit systems, and analytical models are constructed to compare the system performance under both expected and unexpected demand levels. Based on the experiments for various scenarios over a real-life transit example, the critical demands, which represent the switching point between the two competing service policies, have been derived. Our findings show that point deviation policy is more efficient at low-demand levels, while route deviation policy is a better choice at low-to-moderate demand levels. At unexpectedly high demand levels, route deviation policy is better able to accommodate rejected passengers than point deviation policy.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Methodology for Choosing between Route Deviation and Point Deviation Policies for Flexible Transit Services

Zheng

Qiu

2018

Journal of Advanced Transportation

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“…Many studies on WTP in different cities reached a consensus that a good portion of the respondents were willing to consider flexible transit services as one of their travel options, including 40% in Merrill, Wisconsin [2], 60% in the San Francisco Bay area, California [30], and 60% in Jinan, Shandong province of China [4]. More specifically, Jie et al [4] calculated the WTP of 2403 passenger samples collected in the Jinan Qilu Software Park, and reached a result that respondents are willing to pay an average fare of 4 Chinese Yuan (0.60 U.S. dollars equivalent) per trip to use a flexible transit service. Moreover, to our delight, respondents expressed a higher preference (65.5%) for a service that has the fixed-route attribute but with easy-to-access locations for pick-up/drop-off points, for which the flexible system of this paper is exactly suitable.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The transit ridership is usually sensitive to fares, travel times, wait times, and access times, among other factors [27]. Some studies have revealed that flexible transit services are promising operating policies for shaping new travel patterns in low-demand areas [27][28][29][30] and that passengers are generally willing to use these innovative transit systems [4,24]. Many of these systems are well-structured flexible transit systems, but these systems do not precisely combine the actual characteristics of a flexible transit system with the heterogeneity characteristic of passengers' WTP; if we combine these two aspects, the bus company could earn more money, and passengers could get better personally designed service.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…WTP is widely used when analysing the public good of transportation systems [31][32][33][34]. Many studies on WTP in different cities reached a consensus that a good portion of the respondents were willing to consider flexible transit services as one of their travel options, including 40% in Merrill, Wisconsin [2], 60% in the San Francisco Bay area, California [29], and 60% in Jinan, Shandong province of China [4]. More specifically, Yu et al [4] calculated the WTP of 2403 passenger samples collected in the Jinan Qilu Software Park, and reached a result that respondents are willing to pay an average fare of 4 Chinese Yuan (0.60 US dollars equivalent) per trip to use a flexible transit service.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to reports from different cities, many passengers were willing to consider flexible transit services as a travel option [2][3][4]. A number of bus companies have focused on flexible transit operating modes, such as DIDI minibus [5], Ruyue bus [6], and DaDa bus [7] in China.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Flexible transit routing model considering passengers’ willingness to pay

Pei

Lin

Liu

et al. 2019

IET Intelligent Transport Systems

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This paper proposes an alternative flexible transit model with two levels of bus stops, A level and B level. A-level bus stops are fixed, while B-level bus stops are flexible and provide service only when passengers indicate a strong willingness to pay (WTP). This fare structure encourages passengers to choose bus stops with their mobile phones or computers. An optimization model of 0-1 integer-programming is formulated based on whether certain B-level stops can be serviced. With a numerical example, we compare the performance of the proposed traversing method and a tabu search algorithm, both of which are adapted to solve the model. Finally, a real case is provided to evaluate the proposed transit system against comparable systems (e.g., a fixed-route transit system and a taxi service), and the result shows that the flexible transit routing model will help both passengers and bus companies, thus creating a win-win situation.

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