OPERATIONAL ANALYSIS FOR RATIONALISATION AND MANAGEMENT OF IDENTIFIED DTC BUS ROUTES

Abstract

Urban bus transport is the principal mode of mass transport for majority of the urban intra—city trips in India due to its door to door accessibility, flexi-bility and cost effectiveness in comparison to other modes of transport available for urban mobility. The rapid rise in ridership, growing cost of operation, clashing of interest of commuters and operators and various other socio—economic and political reasons, cause an enormous problem for the efficient and effect-ive transit management. The urban bus transport problems can be viewed from two sides. The first is the user's view that there are too few fecilities at the places where they are needed most. On the other hand the bus operators have the opinion that there are too many passengers at the places where they are not expected and, of course, both are correct. flouting and scheduling e 2 two aspects of the problems of assigning a bus fleet to multiple routes so that a certain level of service is provided which satisfied urban travel demand. For the pres.ent study, Delhi metropolitan city has been chosen, as this is the only nearest city to Roorkee which has got bus transit as a principal mode. The existing route system is based on concept of direction—oriented facility by providing the transfer facility at nine nodal points around the city centre. So nine Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) bus routes have been selected for this suty. For location of bus stops on the DTC routes no scientific methodology has been adopted except an adhoc decision based on experience and a given locality. In this study, tirstly all the routes have been analysed for the existing system with the help of a computer simulation model developed at University of Roorkee. Then an analytic model which is based on optimum bus stop spacing is also incorporated along With simulation model. A comparative study has been made between the existing system of bus stop location, equal bus stop spacing criteria and bus stop spacing based on optimisation of generalized cost of passener journey. The study has been made through various indices viz. Running Index (RI), passenger and Efficiency Index (ET). WaitingIndex (p141)/These indices gives an idea about the performance of DTC bus routes. The effect of various management proposals such as equal bus stop spacing bus stop spacing based on optimization of generalised cost of passenger journey, effect of variation in the number of the buses in peak hours and exclusive bus lane system have been analysed and a comparison is made among all these management proposals. The results shows that the management proposals i.e. exclusive bus lane system, effect of variation in the number of buses in peak hours and removal of some uneconomical bus stops can be adopted in order of priority for any improvement in the existing system. The findings of the above study presented here can be applied to all other situations of urban bus transit systems and is geographical transferable.