Optimizing the routes of the hop-on hop-off sightseeing bus in Taipei city: a new method based on the criteria from major tourism cities

ABSTRACT

The objective of a hop-on-hop-off sightseeing bus is to provide the highest accessibility to the most desirable attractions of the place. Four tourism cities worldwide, London, Vienna, Edinburgh, and Singapore, were studied to benchmark the system's spatial and non-spatial criteria. The head/tail breaks principle sets up the threshold to measure the popularity, and the space syntax measures to evaluate the accessibility. The primary goals for a sightseeing bus system should consider the benefits of the bus takers, the revenue and costs of system providers, and the marketing and competitiveness of local authorities. Hence the length and number of bus stops per route should be limited to no more than 1.5–2 hours per loop. The four accessibility measures for attractions were considered higher than the city's second-rank (M2) mean value. The results showed that in the optimizing process using the benchmarked criteria, the coverage ratio of Grade 1, 2, and 3 attractions was enhanced by 25%, 42%, and 20% higher, respectively, than the existing sightseeing bus system in Taipei City. This optimizing accessibility process should be transferable to other means by planners to increase the tourist visits, such as the bicycle system, shared scooters, and walking areas.

KEYWORDS:

• Double-decker bus
• route analysis
• urban tourism
• space syntax
• GIS

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the reviewers and editors whose feedback was very helpful in improving the article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Since the covid-19 outbreak, Taipei's tourism industry remains in a constant waiting status. The hop-on-hop-off bus is running but has not significantly changed on optimizing the designation of the route from 2020 to 2022.

2 This head/tail breaks classification system introduced by Jiang (2013) is suitable for data with heavy-tailed. The concept applied here is the original head; say, 20% of the attractions may draw 80% of tourists, and the rest 80% of attractions (the tail) can draw only 20% of total tourists. ‘The continuous process iteratively for the values (above means) in the head until the head part values are no longer heavy-tailed distributed(Jiang, 2013).’

3 This M2 standard is a result of the trial and error method to keep the selected threshold at a relatively higher value in overall proportion. Using the second rank mean value (M2) could keep the axial lines in the top 15%(Edinburgh, 7.14%+7.14%) to the top 2.6% (Singapore). M1 will include too few lines, and M3 will drop to 25% and lose the concept of top accessibility lines.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan: [grant no 106-2119-M-305−003].