Bus Rapid Transit Network Design based on Travel Demand: A Case Study of Karaj, Iran

The bus rapid transit (BRT) network is an important public transportation system in some metropolises across the world. Hence, many urban managers and planners seek to develop BRT networks as they are more much flexible than railway transportation networks and can transport huge numbers of passengers. This paper designed a BRT network based on the travel demand using a binary nonlinear mathematical programming model with the aim of maximizing the covered demand and minimizing the construction cost. To calculate the covered travel demand and solve the model, a novel methodology which is exclusive to this study was proposed. To obtain the covered travel demand, the number of covered travels was calculated using the concentric circle method and the center of mass distances of the covered trips in the origins and destinations from the travel start and end stations. Based on the trip demand lines, major production and attraction land-uses, and network shape and integration, five BRT corridors were considered for the city of Karaj, Iran. The network design results suggest that the corridors would cover a total of 244,600 trips (28.7% of the total morning peak-hour trips in 2031). The corridors were estimated to have a total construction cost of 282.5 million USD.