Is the Bus Coming? An Introduction to Public Transit Planning With Limited Resources

At the highest level, public transit planning can be broken down into three stages; strategic planning, operational planning, and, at a later stage, planning or re-planning.

Strategic public transit planning is related to urban planning; it includes the design of a transit network, route definition, and scheduling.

Definition of the topology – i.e., the lines and stops making up the transit network – might be an easily revisable and reversible decision in the case of buses, but harder to turn around in rail systems like BRTs, LRTs, or subway lines.

Once the set of lines and stops has been defined, the next step is to define the routes to be run on those lines. In a typical linear layout, there is usually one outbound route and another inbound.

On the whole set of lines, routes, and stops, the schedule is set as the times the vehicles will pass by each of the network stops. To set the schedule, a series of trips or expeditions is created, where “trip” is a succession of stops covered in a given order.

Operational planning includes the creation of the vehicle service and the driver service, as well as the rostering.

A vehicle service is the vehicle’s daily set of trips or expeditions. Similarly, a driver service is the set of trips or expeditions to be made by a driver on that same day.

When generating the vehicle and driver services, it is important to bear in mind all constraints that may have to be met, both legal (maximum working day, required breaks, etc.) and operational (location of bus garages, synchronization of bus/train changes, synchronization of different routes passing through the same stop, predictive and corrective maintenance, refueling, etc.).

Shift planning, meanwhile, enables a public transit operator to keep track of the hours worked by its drivers and other employees, to ensure the various requirements are met (collective bargaining agreements, reduced working day, vacation days, leave, preferences, personal limitations, etc.), as well as balancing out the workload between the various employees.

Over the years, these problems have been a significant headache for public transit authorities and operators; an intricate sudoku whose complexity varies in direct proportion to the size of the fleet and network.

Traditionally, various more or less seat-of-the-pants methods have been used, including paper planning on the basis of unconnected data, with the following drawbacks: a very time-consuming and unwieldy planning arrangement, difficulty recording historical data; and a heavy dependence on gurus or planning experts who, after years of struggling with this problem, had become indispensable in their organizations.

To ensure efficient and effective planning and to optimize the always scarce resources, GMV offers public transit authorities and operators the GMV Planner suite of powerful algorithm-driven tools that ensures simple and efficient planning of all aspects. This frees experts from tedious tasks, enabling them to spend the extra time on other tasks of greater added value to the organization.

Author: Iker Estébanez