Managing congestion at the entrance of subway stations with reserved inbound service

Abstract

During peak hours at many entrances of subway stations, huge queues of passengers try to enter. To address this congestion, the city of Beijing has introduced a reserved inbound services in several subway stations. Passengers can reserve a time interval via which they can enter with reduced queuing. We aim to analyse and optimize this system while modelling the congestion and choices of travellers using a Vickrey bottleneck model approach. We develop a reserved system where there can be a different number of reservation time intervals before and after the preferred arrival time, and for common preferences for schedule delay adding intervals before the preferred arrival time reduces travel costs more than adding them after it. Results show that the time interval set can influence both implementation conditions and the efficiency of the reserved system. Suggestions about the time interval set are given. Passengers’ inbound choices with different inbound peak reservation costs are analysed.

KEYWORDS:

• On-demand transportation service
• reservation mechanism
• reserved inbound service
• traffic congestion
• bottleneck model

Acknowledgments

The work described in this paper was jointly supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2021YJS204) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72091513).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The bracking model of Lindsey, van den Berg, and Verhoef (2012), seems much less suited still, as it is difficult. If not impossible, for waiting passengers to ‘brake’ and block an entire pathway and keep the pathway ahead empty.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72091513] and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2021YJS204].