Evaluation of bus bridging scenarios for railway service disruption management: a users’ delay modelling tool

Aya Aboudina (), Alaa Itani (), Ehab Diab (), Siva Srikukenthiran () and Amer Shalaby ()
Additional contact information
Aya Aboudina: Cairo University
Alaa Itani: University of Toronto
Ehab Diab: University of Toronto
Siva Srikukenthiran: University of Toronto
Amer Shalaby: University of Toronto

Public Transport, 2021, vol. 13, issue 3, No 2, 457-481

Abstract: Abstract Unexpected transit service disruptions degrade the quality of service provided to the public. Bus bridging is considered a key response strategy used to handle metro service interruptions, where buses are retracted from scheduled services and deployed to offer shuttle services along disrupted segments. Most transit agencies rely on ad-hoc approaches (based on experience) to determine which buses should be dispatched from the scheduled services, with little (or no) consideration of the impacts on users’ delays. This paper presents a practical tool to estimate the total users’ delay associated with a user-specified bus bridging plan. The tool is based on deterministic queueing theory. The total delay is composed of two components; direct delays of affected metro passengers along the disrupted segment and indirect delays of bus riders on the routes from which shuttle buses are dispatched. The tool utilizes several input data, including travel times, train load information, boarding and alighting passenger counts, bus frequencies, and routes’ cycle times. It provides transit practitioners and operational managers with a valuable instrument for evaluating different bus bridging scenarios. A case study of the transit network in Toronto is used to illustrate the tool’s functionality.

Keywords: Public transport; Railway disruption; Bus bridging; Shuttle service (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12469-020-00238-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:pubtra:v:13:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s12469-020-00238-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... search/journal/12469

DOI: 10.1007/s12469-020-00238-w

Access Statistics for this article

Public Transport is currently edited by Stefan Voß

More articles in Public Transport from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().