Development of a Hub and Spoke Model for Bus Transit Route Network Design

For a large city bus transit service, a point to point route network, attempting to connect each node to every other node results in large number of routes in the network which makes it practically very complex to understand and operate the services. To overcome these limitations a different transit network design approach is required. A combination of traditional destination oriented routes along with direction oriented routes, which is called as Hub and Spoke network could be better for operating bus transit in large network. Previous research works done using hub-and-spoke model mainly concentrates on airline network, where the influencing factors and variables for network design could be substantially different than transit network. This paper presents an approach to develop hub and spoke route network for bus transit services. Whole process consists of obtaining potential hubs, finding optimum location of hubs and allocation of non-hub nodes to hub nodes, generating inter hub and intra-hub routes and the frequencies for running buses. The model developed in this study is tested on the Mandl\u27s Swiss network of fifteen nodes. The Mandl\u27s network is most widely used by many researchers to analyze their models developed for point to point bus transit route network. The results suggest noticeable savings in operator cost along with slight increase in user cost