Network-level Optimization of Bus Stop Placement in Urban Areas

Bus stops provide accessibility to public transit service, whereas they also influence the efficiency of mobility due to the extra dwell time. The decision of bus stop locations is a tradeoff between access coverage and mobility. This paper formulates a biobjective optimization model of bus stop placement problem at the network level. Two objectives are pertinent to the improvement of mobility: minimization of total dwell time at stops and minimization of total number of bus stops. Access coverage is constrained to ensure a certain level of accessibility. The issue of stop congestion and its effect on road traffic flow is also considered in the model. The model is applied to a case study of the bus network in urban areas of Yancheng, China. The results show that the proposed model can be efficiently solved by CPLEX to obtain Pareto optimal solutions for real-case problems.