The Bus Rapid Transit Investment Problem

Abstract

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems can be of great value to attract passengers towards public transport, as they offer an attractive service at relatively low investment costs. Often, BRT lines are created by giving the bus a dedicated right of way along segments of an existing bus line. This paper focuses on quantifying the trade-off between the number of attracted passengers and the available investment budget when upgrading a line. Motivated by the construction of a new BRT line around Copenhagen, we consider multiple municipalities that invest in the line. We additionally allow restrictions on the number of connected components to be upgraded to enforce connectedness. We suggest two passenger responses to determine the number of attracted passengers and propose an -constraint based algorithm to enumerate all non-dominated points. Moreover, we perform an extensive experimental evaluation on artificial instances and a case study for the BRT line around Copenhagen.