Designing boarding limit strategy by considering stop-level fairness amid the COVID-19 outbreak

Abstract

Bus operators have to make trade-offs between transporting more passengers and maintaining social distancing to reduce ridership congregation amid Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. The traditional bus boarding mode could easily lead passengers fully occupy the bus available capacity at one stop, and it would prevent subsequent passengers from boarding. It is crucial to establish a new operating mode and strategy to ensure all passengers have opportunities to ride and to collaboratively optimise the bus timetable. In this paper, the boarding limit strategy that considers the fairness of passenger boarding probability is proposed to address the inequitable problem with minimise the passenger travel time and the number of stranded passengers. The coupling relationship between bus dwell time and passenger flow is used to collaboratively optimise the bus timetable. Case studies are conducted to illustrate the performance of the boarding limit strategy in improving passenger boarding equity.

KEYWORDS:

• Bus operation
• boarding limit strategy
• stop-level fairness
• social distancing
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 72171020, 72101013]; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 2021RC237]; 111 project [grant number B20071].