Optimizing Fare Structure and Level of the Distance-based City Bus Fare Scheme

• Main Authors: Wang, Yi, 王易
• Other Authors: Chiou, Yu-Chiun
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/37757074699876795818

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 運輸與物流管理學系 === 104 === City bus fare schemes in Taiwan are mostly flat-fare and stage fare. The cross-subsidization of short-haul trips and long-haul trips and the problem of segmentation points or buffer zones are the disadvantages of stage fare, though its fare scheme and fare collection is very simple and user-friendly. While the fast innovation of modern technologies, such as GPS and smart-cards, making complicated fare schemes more possible and low cost. Based on this background, this study proposed a multi-objective mathematical programming model to optimize the fare structure and level of distance-based fare. The objectives include maximization of bus trips, maximization of zonal equality, maximization of user equality, and minimization of subsidization, while the constraints include the revenue must be hold in different bus companies, and the subsidy budget is a finite amount. The zonal equality is defined as the variation of average travel cost per bus trip in every administrative districts, and the user equality is compared to reasonable fare rate or basic fare plus reasonable fare rate using ordinary least square. The Analytic Hierarchy Process was used to determine the weights in order to transform multi-objectives to a single objective. The model can be transformed into 4 models depending on its decision variables and the base of comparing user equality. Model 1 and 3 are based on the reasonable fare rate, and only the former model includes the basic-distance as a decision variable. Model 2 and 4 are based on the basic fare plus reasonable fare rate, and also only the former model includes the basic-distance. This study uses the city bus system in Taipei Metropolitan as an example, and marginal effect analysis was used to compute the changes of demand. The models are solved by the Genetic Algorithm, results show that model 1 and 2 have short basic-distances while model 3 and 4 have long basic-distances. The number of bus trips and the zonal equality could be enhanced, and government is prone to not subsidizing bus users in all models. However, the result of user equality is different depending on different models. In summary, model 2 has the best solving performance. Furthermore, this study conducted a scenario analysis by concerning different objectives and constraints, including overall revenue remaining the same in the network as a constraint, solving without subsidization minimization objective, different subsidization patterns, and sensitivity analysis of subsidization. In the first scenario, results show that the flat-fare is preferred while short basic-distance fare structures are preferred in the second and third scenarios. In the sensitivity analysis, results show that longer basic-distance is preferred only when the subsidy budget is zero and reduces 50%, otherwise, short basic-distance is preferred.