Time and Space Scheduling of Public Transport Networks and the Evaluation of Quality of Service

Abstract

Most of the work being done in public transport scheduling has been concerned with the economics of production, namely with the aim of reducing idle times of buses and crews.

But, especially in large urban areas, there is also a need for tools that allow the management of transit companies to organise their supply in such a way that the perceived quality of the service they provide is as good as possible.

To a large extent, that quality of service depends on the time and space scheduling of supply, that is, on the spatial organisation of the network and, if the frequency of service is relatively low, also on the timetable of services provided. Each of the users of a transit network develops his own (partial) vision of that network, but it is the job of the company to have a global vision of the system and judge how well it suits users needs.

The paper presents a software package developed to represent and evaluate public transit multimodal networks based on the modelling of route choice by the users, along with experience from its application in the restructuring and expansion of transit networks in Lisbon and Porto.