The general public considers Fixed-Route Transit (FRT) to be inconvenient
while Demand-Responsive Transit (DRT) provides much of the desired flexibility with a
door-to-door type of service. However, FRT is typically more cost efficient than DRT to
deploy. Therefore, there is an increased interest in flexible transit services including all
types of hybrid services that combine FRT and pure DRT. The demand-responsive
feeder transit, also known as Demand-Responsive Connector (DRC), is a flexible transit
service because it operates in a demand-responsive fashion within a service area and
moves customers to/from a transfer point that connects to a FRT network. In this
research we develop analytical models, validated by simulation, to design the DRC
system.
Feeder transit services are generally operated with a DRC policy which might be
converted to a traditional FRT policy for higher demand. By using continuous
approximations, we provide an analytical modeling framework to help planners and
operators in their choice of the two policies. We compare utility functions of the two policies to derive rigorous analytical and approximate closed-form expressions of critical
demand densities. They represent the switching conditions, that are functions of the
parameters of each considered scenario, such as the geometry of the service area, the
vehicle speed and also the weights assigned to each term contributing to the utility
function: walking time, waiting time and riding time.
We address the problem faced by planners in determining the optimal number of
zones for dividing a service area. We develop analytical models representing the total
cost functions balancing customer service quality and vehicle operating cost. We obtain
close-form expressions for the FRT and approximation formulas for the DRC to
determine the optimal number of zones.
Finally we develop a real-case application with collected customer demand data
and road network data of El Cenizo, Texas. With our analytical formulas, we obtain the
optimal number of zones, and the times for switching FRT and DRC policies during a
day. Simulation results considering the road network of El Cenizo demonstrate that our
analytical formulas provide good estimates for practical use.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2009-08-7074 |
| Date | 2009 August 1900 |
| Creators | Li, Xiugang |
| Contributors | Quadrifoglio, Luca |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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