A self-coördinating bus route to resist bus bunching

John J. Bartholdi and Donald D. Eisenstein

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2012, vol. 46, issue 4, 481-491

Abstract: The primary challenge for an urban bus system is to maintain constant headways between successive buses. Most bus systems try to achieve this by adherence to a schedule; but this is undermined by the tendency of headways to collapse, so that buses travel in bunches. To counter this, we propose a new method of coördinating buses. Our method abandons the idea of a schedule and even any a priori target headway. Under our scheme headways are dynamically self-equalizing and the natural headway of the system tends to emerge spontaneously. Headways also become self-correcting in that after disturbances they reëqualize without intervention by management or even awareness of the drivers.

Keywords: Bus bunching; Transit operations; Headway control; Adaptive control; Self-organization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.trb.2011.11.001

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