feeder network design for rapid transit system M.S. Bijan Abooalizadeh Behbahani, Sharif University of Technology

Encouraging passengers in order to use public transportation facilities is one of the goals of transportation planners. The most effective way to increase the market share of public transportation is enhancing its Level of Service via faster and more comfortable transportation in comparison with private vehicles. Exploitation of rapid transportation lines (Subway, BRT, and etc.) is justifiable in corridors in which the demand exceeds a minimum value. While in most of metropolitans such demand may not be present inadvertently in any of corridors, generating the needed demand and increasing the accessibility to public transportation is possible using feeder lines like feeder buses. In fact, feeder networks play a complementary role for rapid public transit lines and they increase accessibility and coverage of these rapid public transit networks. Selecting the proper set of feeder bus lines from the candidate routes and using appropriate number of buses in each line not only completes the coverage of public transportation network, but also decreases the delay of passengers using public transportation via reducing the access time of passengers to public transportation facilities. In this study, modeling and solving of the problem of designing feeder networks for rapid transit systems will be discussed.