Passenger Focused Shuttle Bus Planning

Passengers experience significant inconvenience from track closures required for planned maintenance and infrastructure updates of rail networks. Generally, operators restore connectivity with shuttle busses replacing the closed link in the network. This however introduces additional transfers, while the speed of travel on busses for the replaced links is generally lower than the speed of the previous rail service. Therefore, a passenger-demand based design of shuttle services that takes into account the true origin and destination of passengers, the change in speed on the bussedlinks, and possible alternative routes for busses, may improve passenger service without increasing operating cost. This presentation will cover two topics. On the one hand, it will give a short overview of some of the work done by the authors on deducing passenger behavior from smart card data in the Netherlands. This includes the deduction of route choices and travel patterns of passengers. Furthermore, the presentation will discuss in more detail the continuous work on shuttle planning using detailed information on passenger behavior. The remainder of this abstract will focus on the later.