The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	Planning of optimal transit system design
Author:	Liu, Yongning
View Online:	njit-etd1992-129 (xi, 74 pages ~ 2.1 MB pdf)
Department:	Executive Committee for the Interdisciplinary Program in Transportation
Degree:	Master of Science
Program:	Transportation
Document Type:	Thesis
Advisory Committee:	Spasovic, Lazar (Committee chair) Pignataro, Louis J. (Committee member) Bladikas, Athanassios K. (Committee member)
Date:	1992-10
Keywords:	Urban transportation Buses Bus lanes
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	This study presents a methodological approach for finding an optimal design of bus transit service in an urban transportation corridor with elastic demand and under various objective functions. Service design decision variables to be optimized include the route length, route density, headway, number of stops and stop spacing pattern. The objective functions that optimize the transit system design include: minimizing operator cost, maximizing profit, minimizing sum of operator and user costs and maximizing the users' net benefits. The analysis uses an elastic demand function wherein the number of trips are sensitive to the quality of service provided and price charged by the transit system. Several analytical models of transit service design are developed and presented in a form of case studies. Computer-aided optimization methods are used to derive the optimal solutions in each of the case studies.