Serial formation and parallel competition in public transportation

Abstract

In privatized transit networks, operators compete to maximize their individual profits and governing agencies make decisions that influence the competition. We examine a duopolistic transit market with two network structures: (i) parallel: passengers have a choice between the operators, and (ii) serial: passengers are dedicated to one or more operators. We consider a many-to-many and many-to-one demand distribution and use Continuum Approximation to model the problem and derive insights. In many-to-many demand patterns, we find that the fleet size is minimum when there is full overlap of service regions. Numerical results show that the serial formation is more favorable for the society than the parallel formation in many-to-one demand patterns.

Keywords:

• Public transport
• serial formation
• parallel competition
• continuum approximation
• overlapping routes

Disclosure statement

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