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Review of Capacity Improvement Strategies for Bus transit service MUKTI ADVANI AND GEETAM TIWARI*

Abstract Transportation demands in urban areas continue to increase rapidly as a result of both population growth and changes in travel patterns. In the era of environment concerns and limited space available in cities, transport planners have to provide a system, which can ensure safe and clean mobility to all city residents. This requires planning a system, which is affordable, reliable and efficient from the users’ as well as operator’s perspectives. A road based bus system offers an opportunity for creating a system capable of meeting multiple needs of users and operators. This paper presents a critical review of recent planning methodologies and selected decision support systems for optimizing urban bus transport services. These methodologies offer incremental improvements in bus system to meet the capacity requirements of different size cities. It is imperative that bus systems are planned such that they satisfy the requirements of users as well as service providers within the limited resource constraints. A flexible, comfortable, easily available and reliable bus service is expected to shift people from private vehicles to public transport. This paper presents a review of strategies which can be employed to satisfy public transport demands of different city sizes.

Keywords Bus, Optimization, Transfer, Synchronization.

*

Ms. Mukti Advani is Research Scholar and Geetam Tiwari is Associate Professor, Transportation Research & Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP), Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

INDIAN JOURNAL OF TRANSPORT MANAGEMENT

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INTRODUCTION

Indian cities, of all sizes, face a crisis of urban transport. Despite investments in road infrastructure, and plans for landuse and transport development, all cities face the ever increasing problems of congestion, traffic accidents, air, and noise pollution. Large cities are facing a rapid growth of personal vehicles (two wheelers and cars) and in medium and small cities different forms of intermediate public transport provided by the informal sector are struggling to meet the mobility demands of city residents. Public transport is a critical element of urban transport system. A great emphasis needs to be given to the public transport system because it offers the most efficient utilization of limited resources – energy and land. At present, a range of public transport options are available for different city sizes. A careful analysis is required to select the most appropriate technology for a given city size. Rail based systems have often been recommended based on their capacity to move large number of people (> 30,000 passengers/phpd). However, they are controversial options of public transport because of the large financial burden they can impose on city budgets. Also, the existing rail based systems have shown low ridership, low capacity utilization and high operating subsidies. Bus transport is the most desirable and sustainable system from societal perspective. A well planned bus system can provide a high level of mobility to a large section of the population with least cost. However, a poorly planned system causes inconvenience to the users, loses ridership, encourages use of private vehicles and imposes financial burden on the operator. A flexible, comfortable, easily available and reliable bus service may encourage shift from private vehicles to public transport. Since travel demand varies over time and space, public transport systems often have under utilized capacity at non peak hours and high load factor in peak hours. The objective of an efficient system is to meet the diverse demands and minimize operator’s loss. This requires that the optimizing, routing, scheduling and synchronizing problems are given special attention, while designing an efficient bus system. 2.

Urban Travel Demand

There are 4,000 cities and towns in India including cities having population less than 1 million to more than 9 millions. As shown in Table 1, 147 cities have a population of less than 1 lakh, and 177 cities have a population between 1 to 5 lakh. About 28 cities have a population of 5 to 10 lakh, 6 cities

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with population of 10 to 20 lakh, 3 cities with population of 50 to 100 lakh and 3 cities have a population of more than 100 lakh. Table 1: Indian cities and population Population No. Of Cities