Assessing time savings as bus rapid transit is introduced in Barcelona: a bus network design approach

The current growth of the urban population in cities is leading to mobility challenges. The increase of private cars in the city centers has become unsustainable and changes in the efficiency and diversity of public transportation are needed. Urban buses are regarded as a viable and cost-effective solution, namely the bus rapid transit systems. Several methods have been studied and developed to design efficient urban bus networks. This work presents a mathematical programming model to design a bus network. The objective is to minimize the time that an average user spends inside the network, by defining a set of routes, with associated frequencies that satisfy the demand predicted for each origin–destination pair. It is then applied to a case study in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, where the impact of the implementation of a bus rapid transit route in the existing network is studied. The results serve as a decision support to improve the network, by returning the set of routes and associated frequencies that minimize the target objective function. A decrease of 8.75 min in the time spent by an average user inside the network is achieved, representing a reduction of 15% when compared to the current solution, and confirming the existence of room for improvement.