Transportation Dissertation
| Title | A Strategy for Rural Bus Route Network Design |
|---|---|
| Year | 2009 |
| Summary | Yin-Wen Peng, 2009.01 Many rural bus services are forced to close due to insufficient subsidy. However,the essential public transportation services are still expected to provide in rural area especially for the incapable, elderly, and young people. The network of bus service can affect the operation efficiency and cost. The objective of this study is to redesign the rural bus route network in order to reduce the operation cost and release the financial pressure of government subsidy. The OD patterns and travel demand characteristics of passengers in rural areas are analyzed in the study. The results show that most of the OD patterns of rural bus service are few-to-many, which are similar to school and commuter buses services.Then, the abstract model- Vehicle Routing Problem used in school bus services is modified to be a fundamental model to design new rural bus network. Kaohsiung County is chose to be an empirical study area. Several new bus networks are designed according to the OD table and different operation constraints.The results show that Bus Company can save more than 23% of total system cost due to reduce the total bus kilometers. For low demand area, two services strategies, they are ‘direct route with low frequency’ and ‘trunk-transfer route with high frequency’are evaluated in the study. The penalty cost causes the direct service is better than transfer service in rural bus services. Beside, the study finds that the bus with capacity less than 30 seats per bus is not conomical for conventional rural bus services. |