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On-demand transit is attracting the attention of transportation researchers and transit agencies for its potential to solve the first-mile/last-mile problem. Although on-demand transit has been proved to increase transit accessibility significantly, its impact on transit equity and equality has not been addressed. In this study we examined the potential impact of the On-Demand Multimodal Transit System (ODMTS) in Atlanta (GA), on both transit equity and equality compared with the existing transit system. The results showed that ODMTS could have a positive impact on transit equality by reducing the disparity in transit service between neighborhoods close to and far from the existing transit network; however, it may not improve transit equity.
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An analysis of individuals’ usage of bus transit in Bengaluru, India: Disentangling the influence of unfamiliarity with transit from that of subjective perceptions of service quality
- Award ID(s):
- 1828010
- PAR ID:
- 10432694
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Travel Behaviour and Society
- Volume:
- 29
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 2214-367X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 11
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Public-transit systems face a number of operational challenges: (a) changing ridership patterns requiring optimization of fixed line services, (b) optimizing vehicle-to-trip assignments to reduce maintenance and operation codes, and (c) ensuring equitable and fair coverage to areas with low ridership. Optimizing these objectives presents a hard computational problem due to the size and complexity of the decision space. State-of-the-art methods formulate these problems as variants of the vehicle routing problem and use data-driven heuristics for optimizing the procedures. However, the evaluation and training of these algorithms require large datasets that provide realistic coverage of various operational uncertainties. This paper presents a dynamic simulation platform, called Transit-Gym, that can bridge this gap by providing the ability to simulate scenarios, focusing on variation of demand models, variations of route networks, and variations of vehicle-to-trip assignments. The central contribution of this work is a domain-specific language and associated experimentation tool-chain and infrastructure to enable subject-matter experts to intuitively specify, simulate, and analyze large-scale transit scenarios and their parametric variations. Of particular significance is an integrated microscopic energy consumption model that also helps to analyze the energy cost of various transit decisions made by the transportation agency of a city.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Public-transit systems face a number of operational challenges: (a) changing ridership patterns requiring optimization of fixed line services, (b) optimizing vehicle-to-trip assignments to reduce maintenance and operation codes, and (c) ensuring equitable and fair coverage to areas with low ridership. Optimizing these objectives presents a hard computational problem due to the size and complexity of the decision space. State-of-the-art methods formulate these problems as variants of the vehicle routing problem and use data-driven heuristics for optimizing the procedures. However, the evaluation and training of these algorithms require large datasets that provide realistic coverage of various operational uncertainties. This paper presents a dynamic simulation platform, called \textsc{Transit-Gym}, that can bridge this gap by providing the ability to simulate scenarios, focusing on variation of demand models, variations of route networks, and variations of vehicle-to-trip assignments. The central contribution of this work is a domain-specific language and associated experimentation tool-chain and infrastructure to enable subject-matter experts to intuitively specify, simulate, and analyze large-scale transit scenarios and their parametric variations. Of particular significance is an integrated microscopic energy consumption model that also helps to analyze the energy cost of various transit decisions made by the transportation agency of a city.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tbs.2022.05.001
