Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Transit Bus Fleet Age And Replacement Type Optimization, Miguel A. Figliozzi, Wei Feng, Jesse Boudart

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Due to recent budget and fiscal constraints, it is ever more imperative for transit agencies to manage their fleets in an optimal way. Fleet data have consistently shown that bus operational and maintenance (O&M) per-mile costs increase as buses age. From a purely economic perspective, there is a cost tradeoff between the lower O&M costs of newer fleets and their higher initial capital costs. This tradeoff has a significant impact on the optimal timing of purchase and replacement decisions. Utilizing realistic cost data and an optimization modeling framework, we analyze (a) the impact of purchase timing decisions on fleet per-mile …

A Study Of Headway Maintenance For Bus Routes: Causes And Effects Of “Bus Bunching” In Extensive And Congested Service Areas, Miguel A. Figliozzi, Wu-Chi Feng, Gerardo Lafferriere, Wei Feng

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A healthy and efficient public transit system is indispensable to reduce congestion, emissions, energy consumption, and car dependency in urban areas. The objective of this research is to 1) develop methods to evaluate and visualize bus service reliability for transit agencies in various temporal and spatial aggregation levels; 2) identify the recurrent unreliability trends of bus routes (focusing on high-frequency service periods) and understand their characteristics, causes and effects; and 3) model service times using linear regression models.

This research utilized six months of archived automatic vehicle location (AVL) and automatic passenger count (APC) data from a low-performance route (Route …