CityLines: Designing Hybrid Hub-and-Spoke Transit System with Urban Big Data

摘要

Rapid urbanization has posed significant burden on urban transportation infrastructures. In today's cities, both private and public transits have clear limitations to fulfill passengers’ needs for quality of experience (QoE): Public transits operate along fixed routes with long wait time and total transit time; Private transits, such as taxis, private shuttles and ride-hailing services, provide point-to-point transits with high trip fare. In this paper, we propose CityLines, a transformative urban transit system, employing hybrid hub-and-spoke transit model with shared shuttles. Analogous to Airlines services, the proposed CityLines system routes urban trips among spokes through a few hubs or direct paths, with travel time as short as private transits and fare as low as public transits. CityLines allows both point-to-point connection to improve the passenger QoE, and hub-and-spoke connection to reduce the system operation cost. To evaluate the performance of CityLines, we conduct extensive data-driven experiments using one-month real-world trip demand data (from taxis, buses and subway trains) collected from Shenzhen, China. The results demonstrate that CityLines reduces 12.5-44 percent average travel time, and aggregates 8.5-32.6 percent more trips with ride-sharing over other implementation baselines.