A relativity theory of traffic along a transit line

RelStat12, 12th Annual International Conference on Reliability and Statistics in Transportation and Communications, Riga, LETTONIE, 17-/10/2012 - 20/10/2012Along a transit line, vehicle traffic and passenger traffic are jointly subject to variability in travel time and vehicle load hence crowding. The paper provides a stochastic model of passenger physical time and generalized time, including waiting on platform and in-vehicle run time from access to egress station. Five sources of variability are addressed: (i) vehicle headway which can vary between the stations provided that each service run maintains its rank throughout the local distributions of headways; (ii) vehicle order in the schedule of operations; (iii) vehicle capacity; (iv) passenger arrival time; (v) passenger sensitivity to quality of service. The perspective of the operator, which pertains to vehicle runs, is distinguished from the user's one at the disaggregate level of the individual trip