A vicious cycle along busy bus corridors and how to abate it
arxiv(2024)
Abstract
We unveil that a previously-unreported vicious cycle can be created when bus
queues form at curbside stops along a corridor. Buses caught in this cycle
exhibit growing variation in headways as they travel from stop to stop. Bus
(and patron) delays accumulate in like fashion and can grow large on long, busy
corridors. We show that this damaging cycle can be abated in simple ways.
Present solutions entail holding buses at a corridor entrance and releasing
them as per various strategies proposed in the literature. We introduce a
modest variant to the simplest of these strategies. It releases buses at
headways that are slightly less than, or equal to, the scheduled values. It
turns out that periodically releasing buses at slightly smaller headways can
substantially reduce bus delays caused by holding so that benefits can more
readily outweigh costs in corridors that contain a sufficient number of serial
bus stops. The simple variant is shown to perform about as well as, or better
than, other bus-holding strategies in terms of saving delays, and is more
effective than other strategies in regularizing bus headways. We also show that
grouping buses from across multiple lines and holding them by group can be
effective when patrons have the flexibility to choose buses from across all
lines in a group. Findings come by formulating select models of bus-corridor
dynamics and using these to simulate part of the Bus Rapid Transit corridor in
Guangzhou, China.
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