Public transport service planning
Service planning is one of the most important aspects of public transport. Here’s how mobility planners can speed up and improve this process, while minimizing the uncertainties that accompany it.
What is public transport service planning?
Public transport service planning consists of network design and timetable planning. The goal is to achieve a good public transport supply for the passengers, with minimum effort for the operator.
Through public transport service planning, operators can tackle some of the most common challenges to their operations, such as:
- Overcrowded busses in the morning due to transport of pupils
- Passengers missing connections at certain stops because of delays
- Adjusting bus and train services during construction works at bridges and roads
- How to shorten bus lines when an adjacent tram line is extended
Software for public transport service planning
Like in many other areas of mobility, software can greatly improve public transport service planning and speed up the digitization.
With software, public transport planners can combine multiple scenarios, integrate data from other departments, and present plans to stakeholders.
Compared to manual methods like pen-and-paper or Excel, modeling in specialized software helps public transport operators to speed up service planning and better predict how changes will affect the network.
The recent pandemic highlighted the benefits of modeling in public transport service planning: Extensive adjustments to timetables could be made at short notice due to health or cost requirements, with less errors.
Visualizing service planning with PTV Visum
Here are some of the features that make PTV Visum ideal for visualizing public transport service planning:
Graphical Timetable Editor
The graphical timetable editor displays the timetable’s trips in a time-distance diagram. Depicting multiple lines, a user selection of stops and arrival/departure times is ideal for a service planner.
By clicking on one journey near a transfer stop, all possible and missed connection journeys are presented in a table. This gives planners valuable insights for connection optimization.
When combining it with count data and PTV Visum assignment results, the demand distribution on the single vehicle journeys is visible. Therefore, you can visualize the sections of high occupancy on vehicles and demand peaks over time and space.
Transfer display
The transfer display depicts all transfers in a given time on one stop. The circle mimics a clock, the arrows represent the arriving and departing vehicle journeys. The position indicates the transfer time between arriving and departing trips. By selecting two trips, the required walking time and waiting time between those are indicated.
Combining it with counting data, or the PTV Visum assignment results, clearly indicates which connections are currently used. Reducing waiting times for these connections improves service quality for passengers.
Schematic Line Diagram
Supply planners focus on network planning, timetable design, and connection optimization. The major elements - line courses, served stops and frequencies, and headway offsets - can be summarized in one view: The schematic line diagram. This kind of display supports the planning of public transport supply by providing a quick overview and serves as a tool to communicate ideas to other stakeholders.
Extensive graphic parameters, bars, and labeling options allow you to clearly present important aspects, such as:
- service frequencies
- departure times
- service type operators
- model results: capacities, volumes, transfer flows
One software suite
A unique feature of PTV Visum is that it is one software suite, based on one dataset. Therefore, changes in one view are immediately updated in the other. Synchronization is possible, which means clicking on one object in one view will mark it in the other views. This enhances your daily work: You continue your work while choosing the optimal view on your data.
Extended features for planning Services
These features enhance the service design and give a deeper insight into the effects on the system.
Multimodality aspects: Calculating modal shift. In PTV Visum you model not only public transport, but all modes of mobility. You can model people’s choices of a specific transport system. Therefore, you can estimate how many people will switch to public transport from other modes, because of planned measures or scenarios.
Assignments & posteriori analysis: In an assignment, combining demand and supply results in a set of individual paths. All the connections made by passengers are stored in the model, with the exact schedule and timestamps. This data can be assessed in multiple posteriori analysis, like selected link analysis or skim matrix calculation.
Timetable-based assignment of headway-based supply: In early planning phases, not all details of a planned supply are available. A new extension of the timetable based-assignment procedure can deal with PT services, which only holds the headway information, but not the information about the departure time. This enables planners to include such lines in the network without assuming connection details.
Headway Offset Optimization: A major part of service planning is optimizing the connection between lines. Therefore, PTV Visum offers an algorithm for optimizing the offset of headways for a single line, or the entire network, to minimize passengers’ waiting times.
Operating Indicators
Vehicle Scheduling: Vehicle Scheduling turns the timetable into tour plans for buses and trams. It derives the number of needed vehicles and the performance indicators like service mileage and hour.
Cost Calculation: Having the performance indicators on all levels of the timetable enables you to derive the operating cost of the timetable.
Cost / Benefit Calculation (Standi 2016+): Often, expensive public transport infrastructure measures are subsidized. Therefore, it must be proven a project is macro-economically sensible. With PTV Visum you can derive all needed characteristic values to provide the evidence (e.g., Standi 2016+).