Impacts on passengers and operators of service reliability for the case of a multi-level public transit network

A framework is developed to calculate reliability from the passengers perspective in a multilevel public transit network. The major variables that impact reliability for transfers passengers are identified as: scheduled transfer time, headways of connecting lines, variation of vehicle operations, transfer walking time and proportion of transferring passengers. These variables are examined in the context of changing the scheduled transfer time in a hypothetical network and in the case that a holding strategy is added at the transfer point. It is shown that a trade-off exists between scheduled transfer time and reliability. Holding at a transfer point can be beneficial to passengers transferring to the held line, depending on the scheduled transfer time. The calculation method is applied to a cost-benefit analysis to a small example using data from the tram network in The Hague, Netherlands. Benefits to passengers are quantified from changes to the magnitude of a passenger’s travel time, including scheduled travel time and additional travel time, as well as the width of the travel time distribution using the reliability ratio as a value for reliability. Although it is difficult to set a schedule that benefits different groups of transferring passengers, it is possible to realize travel time and reliability benefits through scheduling.Transportation, Infrastructure and LogisticsTransport & PlanningCivil Engineering and Geoscience