Limited-stop high-frequency service design: Reducing in-vehicle congestion

Limited-Stop (LS) bus services have recently proved to be essential for improving user welfare and reducing operators' costs in many cities. The design of LS services has been mainly focused on increasing fleet efficiency and reducing the passengers' travel time. In this work, we change the focus of LS service design towards the user's comfort. Given a fixed-size fleet (fixed costs) and a fixed demand on a very high-frequency bus corridor, we propose an algorithm to minimize the peak load profile, combining the usual All-Stop (AS) and one additional LS service, finding the set of stops for the LS service and the fleet split. The strategy is proved in a set of statistically generated corridors, showing average capacity reductions > 20% at a cost of a marginal travel time increase. Analyzing the peak value in the load profile of all simulated corridors, the number of cases where the majority of users would find a seat on the bus increases from 15% to 53%, making the services much more attractive without increasing the costs.