Abstract
In most cities, travel demand is distributed along long corridors and its destinations tend to concentrate in a central business district. For this kind of many-to-one or one-to-many travel demand pattern, a zonal operation of buses can be an efficient bus operation technique in which a long bus-demand corridor is divided into service zones and each service zone is provided with its own bus route connecting the service zone and single destination separately. This paper develops models of the total transportation costs for a single-zone operation and 2-zonal operation of buses for a long demand corridor with single destination in terms of various cost parameters, demand density, bus operation speeds, and location of the boundary between two service zones. In this study the total transportation cost is assumed to consist of the bus operation cost, passenger waiting cost and passenger travel time cost. It was proved that a zonal operation of buses can be more efficient than a single-zone operation for certain circumstances of the system and an boundary condition between two operation techniques was obtained. Also, several case studies were performed for various values of the cost parameters.
