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Rapid urbanization and growth of population in megacities generate severe pressures on urban rail transit (URT) system. The quantity and frequency of disruptive events have increased significantly, which might have obvious adverse impacts. A large number of passengers are stranded at disrupted URT station when a disruptive event occurs. One essential solution for passenger evacuation is the bus bridging service. This paper is aimed at addressing the passenger evacuation problem caused by a disruptive event in the URT network, by proposing a bus bridging service model considering the passengers' space-time requirements. The model is proposed to minimize the waiting time of passengers and considers factors including bus service capacity limitations, bus stop parking capacity, and the maximum bridging time limit of a single bus. Buses are assumed to provide bridging service on either the local bus route or the direct bus route. The optimal routes and scheduling plans of bridging bus are designed. The model is applied to an example of a disruptive event in Shanghai URT line 9. The results of this example show that the proposed model is capable of reducing the waiting time of passengers and the number of buses used by 3.2% and 24.7%, compared with the traditional bus bridging service. Further analysis of the example shows that it is not a cost-effective solution to reserve a large number of buses for URT disruption. Decision-makers should comprehensively trade off between passengers' space-time demands and monetary costs of bus bridging service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exclusive bus lanes have been widely regarded as an effective way to promote bus priority and improve the service quality, while they have not attracted more passengers to travel by bus in China. Also, more attention is usually paid to the infrastructure and facilities of exclusive bus lanes, but not much attention is paid to the passenger satisfaction of public transit with them. Therefore, this paper studies how to improve the service quality of public transit with exclusive bus lanes from a perspective of passenger satisfaction. A Structural Equation Model (SEM) was developed to investigate the mechanism of relationships between passenger satisfaction and the factors influencing the service quality of public transit with exclusive bus lanes. A total of 2087 respondents from Shanghai, China, participated in this study. Also, a comparison model of different groups using public transit including captive riders, choice riders, and captive by choice riders was established. Results show that passengers were dissatisfied with the current service of public transit with bus lanes, while they would prefer to take buses in the near future. In addition, travel environment, facilities, and convenience, rather than operational efficiency, had significant effects on passenger satisfaction. Through the comparison model, it was found that choice and captive by choice users might prefer public transit with bus lanes and captive users might be unable to bear the financial burden of private motorized travel. "Crowdedness in the buses on bus lanes during peak hours" especially for choice riders and "driving stability" especially for captive riders were the improvement direction for attracting more passengers to travel by bus. The results and the proposed policies of this study can benefit for the planning and operations of exclusive bus lanes in Shanghai and other similar cities around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Providing convenient transit services at reasonable cost is important for transit agencies. Timed transfers that schedule vehicles from various routes to arrive at some transfer stations simultaneously (or nearly so) can significantly reduce wait times in transit networks, while stochastic passenger flows and complex operating environments may reduce this improvement. Although transit priority methods have been applied in some high-density cities, operating delays may cause priority failures. This paper proposes a resilient schedule coordination method for a bus transit corridor, which analyzes link travel time, passenger loading delay, and priority signal intersection delay. It maximizes resilience based on realistic passenger flow volume, whether or not transit priority is provided. The data accuracy and result validity are improved with automatically collected data from multiple bus routes in a corridor. The Yan'an Road transit corridor in Shanghai is used as a case study. The results show that the proposed method can increase the system resilience by balancing operation cost and passenger-based cost. It also provides a guideline for realistic bus schedule coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]