Planning Skip-Stop Transit Service under Heterogeneous Demands

TL;DR

This paper develops a continuous approximation model for designing AB-type skip-stop transit services that adapt to heterogeneous demand patterns, improving efficiency and reducing costs compared to all-stop services.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model and heuristic for optimizing AB-type skip-stop transit, accounting for spatial demand heterogeneity, and demonstrates superior performance over all-stop service.

Findings

AB-type service outperforms all-stop service in various scenarios.

Optimal AB-type design reduces system costs by up to 8%.

AB-type service is especially effective with high demand and uneven trip origins.

Abstract

Transit vehicles operating under skip-stop service visit only a subset of the stops residing along a corridor. It is a strategy commonly used to increase vehicle speeds and reduce patron travel times. The present paper develops a continuous approximation model to optimally design a select form of skip-stop service, termed AB-type service. The model accounts for spatially-heterogeneous demand patterns. An efficient heuristic is developed to obtain solutions. These are shown to be near-optimal for a variety of numerical examples. Results also indicate that optimal AB-type designs outperform optimized all-stop service in a variety of cases. The AB-type service is found to be especially competitive when travel demands are high, trip origins are unevenly distributed along a corridor, and patrons have relatively high values of time. In these cases, AB-type service is found to reduce system costs by as much as 8%.