Reimagining the future ridership of city bus

Abstract

In India, nearly one-third of the total population lives in urban areas. Urbanisation has increased from 31.28% to 35.39% since 2011, indicating public transport demand in urban areas. Out of the available options of public transport modal choice, transit service conditions are dependent on various factors. In the case of public transport services, the introduction of new mass transit systems and unconventional situations (like the COVID-19 era), are creating challenges to existing city bus services in urban India. Bhopal, one of the metropolitan and state capital in central India was successfully a running bus rapid transit system (BRTS) for the last decade but proposed the metro rail system and changing land use and city functions under its influence will challenge the sustenance and future role of BRTS in Bhopal city. The aim of this study is to foresee the role of BRTS Bhopal in the coming years as phase I of the metro will be functional by 2026. As the current metro alignment is parallel to the major BRTS routes hence, it is expected that the current BRTS ridership may shift to the metro and the relevance of existing city bus infrastructure will face serious threat. Factors that affect ridership can be categorised as travel attributes of a city, user’s attributes of the individuals, service quality and operational attributes of the buses. A study suggests that bus ridership may be associated with changes in bus service and neighbourhood characteristics. Age, Gender, Income, Occupation, and Education level are socio-economic user attributes that affect bus usage which is discussed in many research papers. Service attributes define the user satisfaction for using a service such as cleanliness etc. and travel attributes such as trip purpose, trip distance, etc. The analysis is done through multinomial logistic regression for user’s and travel attributes, percentage change for service quality attributes, and linear regression for the operational factors. Significant factors are used to compare study areas with other cities having metro. It was found that people may shift from bus to metro in different scenarios based on their convenience, affordability, and other operational reasons. The 3 scenarios are built assuming the shift on the overlapping routes. Recommendations on bus route rationalization, route lengths, and fleet augmentation are given and the priority areas for the routes are identified using PTAL (existing and predicted 2026). This study suggests when to augment the fleet and route length of the bus network in Indian cities. It is demonstrated by taking the example of Metro Phase I and BRTS of Bhopal.