Reducing an urban rail transit network’s passenger-oriented vulnerability by adding turn-back tracks

Abstract

The links between two adjacent turn-back stations in an Urban Rail Transit Network (URT) are defined as an Interaction Link Set (ILS), and any link interruption in an ILS renders unusable all links in the ILS. The percent decrease in Total Passenger Trips (T-trips), percent increase in Travel Time Per Trip (P-time) and percent increase in the Number of Transfers Per Trip (P-trans), respectively, due to ILS interruption, measure the Passenger-Oriented Vulnerability (POV) of a URT in terms of travel feasibility, travel time and travel convenience. The sum of the length-weighted percent increases in Travel Cost Per Trip (P-cost) for each ILS interruption comprehensively measures a URT’s POV. Models are proposed for minimizing a URT’s POV by adding Turn-Back Tracks (TBs) at stations in an optimized sequence. An application demonstrates that the models can identify which stations should receive TBs according to what priority for effectively reducing the POV.

KEYWORDS:

• Vulnerability
• urban rail transit network
• turn-back tracks
• travel cost

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Chengdu’s rail transit manager for providing relevant data. The Urban Mobility and Equity Center led by Morgan State University.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China: [grant number 72171198; 71701174]; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities: [grant number 2682021ZTPY072]; National Key R & D Program of China: [grant number 2017YFB1200700].