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Optimal fleet size, frequencies and vehicle capacities considering peak and off-peak periods in public transport

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  • Jara-Díaz, Sergio
  • Fielbaum, Andrés
  • Gschwender, Antonio

Abstract

The fleet for surface transit in urban areas - number of buses and vehicle size - is usually determined by the characteristics of demand during the peak period, adjusting frequencies for other periods where those characteristics are quite different. Here the problem is formulated analytically considering a representative single line where hourly passengers flow and average trip lengths differ between peak and off-peak periods. Analytical and numerical results show that minimizing social costs (operators and users) for the whole day yields a larger fleet of smaller buses than if only the peak period is considered. Contrary to previous results on this issue, optimal frequencies across periods differ by a large amount, as optimal peak and off-peak frequencies are larger and smaller respectively than what would be obtained modeling each period by itself. The optimal bus size lies in-between the capacities obtained when each period is independently optimized. Several other interesting counterintuitive results are shown.

Suggested Citation

  • Jara-Díaz, Sergio & Fielbaum, Andrés & Gschwender, Antonio, 2017. "Optimal fleet size, frequencies and vehicle capacities considering peak and off-peak periods in public transport," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 106(C), pages 65-74.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:transa:v:106:y:2017:i:c:p:65-74
    DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2017.09.005
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    16. Nir Sharav & Yoram Shiftan, 2021. "Optimal Urban Transit Investment Model and Its Application," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(16), pages 1-29, August.
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    18. Giovanni Calabro' & Andrea Araldo & Simon Oh & Ravi Seshadri & Giuseppe Inturri & Moshe Ben-Akiva, 2021. "Adaptive Transit Design: Optimizing Fixed and Demand Responsive Multi-Modal Transportation via Continuous Approximation," Papers 2112.14748, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2023.
    19. Høyem, Harald, 2022. "Public transport frequency and risk-taking behavior," Economics of Transportation, Elsevier, vol. 30(C).
    20. Daganzo, Carlos F. & Ouyang, Yanfeng, 2019. "A general model of demand-responsive transportation services: From taxi to ridesharing to dial-a-ride," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 213-224.
    21. Andres Fielbaum & Alejandro Tirachini & Javier Alonso-Mora, 2021. "New sources of economies and diseconomies of scale in on-demand ridepooling systems and comparison with public transport," Papers 2106.15270, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2021.

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