Assessment of bus bridging strategies under unplanned public transit disruptions: a case study from Lyon, France.

Abstract

Unplanned service disruptions often occur on Public Transit (PT), with different levels of intensity. Growing urbanization and environmental issues are two main factors that put increasing pressure on PT. Therefore, service disruptions are expected to occur more often, maybe with tougher impacts than before on public transport demand. In this context, it is valuable to provide insights to PT operators, to develop suitable disruption management strategies. Using four different sources of data (counting, disruption, Automatic Fare Collection and Automatic Vehicle Location data), this paper intends to assess PT robustness, vulnerability and performance of bus bridging strategies towards subway disruptions. The case study introduced in this paper focuses on two of the most severe disruptions which took place between September 15th 2022 and October 15th 2022 on 7 stations of subway line A of Lyon (France). Findings indicate the valuable contribution of bridging buses, that strengthen PT robustness. The major stations rely more on alternative modes that are already available, whereas the minor stations mostly rely on bridging buses. This indicates the need for supply-based management strategies in these areas. Results also show the importance of having efficient buses, that substantially reduce the vulnerability of stations. Above all, this work intends to give a scalable framework to assess the efficiency of disruption management strategies.