Using accessibility measures in urban bus network improvement: A case study of Southampton, UK

Shi, Yuji, Blainey, Simon, Hounsell, Nicholas, Jing, Peng and Sun, Chao (2019) Using accessibility measures in urban bus network improvement: A case study of Southampton, UK. In American Society of Civil Engineers. (Submitted)

Abstract

The current regulatory and planning environment means that road-based public
transport in UK urban areas outside London tends to be planned on a piecemeal basis, and there are often conflicts between the needs and priorities of operators, passengers and planners. In consequence, several local authorities are considering adopting an alternative regulatory environment using quality contracts, with a consequent shift towards centralized service planning. There are though no tools readily available to ensure this centralized service planning will lead to a situation which provides a better balance between the interests of the different stakeholders. This research therefore develops a practical optimization model to fill this gap, using Southampton as a case study to explore the potential improvements, including both route planning and
frequency setting, which could be achieved with centralized planning of bus networks using an adapted tabu search algorithm. The methodology of the improvement approach in this research is defined as a complex multi-objective problem, involves two objective functions: total social cost (which is a combination of operator cost, user cost and external cost) and accessibility levels. The accessibility measures, which integrates the evaluation the transport system with land use patterns, therefore are utilized in the decision-making process of transit network design, alongside the conventional objective function total social cost. The methodology described above has been shown to work well for the Southampton case study. While the methodology described here focuses on the UK context, and potentially could be applied equally well in other contexts around the world.

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Contributors

Author: Simon Blainey

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