A bus network design procedure with elastic demand for large urban areas

The paper deals with a procedure for solving the bus network design problem with elastic demand in a large urban area and its application in a real context (city of Rome). The solution procedure consists of a set of heuristics, which includes a first routine for route generation based on the flow concentration process and a genetic algorithm for finding a sub-optimal set of routes with the associated frequencies. The design criteria are addressed to develop an intensive rather than extensive bus network in order to improve efficiency, integration among direct routes and effective transfer points that strongly affect service quality and ridership. The performances of the transportation system are estimated on a multimodal network taking into account the elasticity of the demand. The final goal of the research is to develop a design framework aiming at shifting the modal split towards the public transport