Chapter 12: Models for Optimizing Transit Fares

Over the past three decades, a substantial amount of attention was given to the problem of transit network design (see Chapter 3). A number of scholars (e.g. Nihan and Morlok, 1976; Turnquist, 1985) had conducted research on the different aspects of the transit system design problem. This includes attempts to employ transit service planning to optimize the system performance of scheduled passenger carriers, generally with the goal of fulfilling various objectives that included system operation under specific constraints as well as under different institutional environments. Focusing on urban transit networks, Ceder and Wilson (1986) described the transit system model as a multi-stage process that can be used to solve a number of transit system design problems, which ranges from network design to crew scheduling problems. List (1990) presented a transit model for sketch-level planning that allowed major changes in the service patterns of a transit network to be assessed quickly. The trans-shipment equations adopted in the model were then used to determine optimal transit vehicle flows in response to passenger flows, service frequency requirements, line segment capacities, system fleet size, and storage node (or station) capacities. In fact, extensive work on the scheduling of urban transit lines can be found in literature (Ceder, 1986; Chakroborty et al., 1995).