Public Transportation

Busway transit has reemerged as a cost-effective transportation alternative for providing urban mobility. This article examines the operational characteristics of an exclusive busway svstem with high passenger ridership and subject to the competitive forces of individual operators. Results of a running time model suggest that the increase in running time associated with an additional passenger movement is low but that the delay imposed by recurrent vehicle deceleration and acceleration related to frequent stops is high. Frequent vehicle stops reduce fuel efficiency, increase...

High traffic congestion and travel times in the cities of Latin America and the Caribbean have significant impacts on air quality, population health, and well-being. To address these challenges, policy and infrastructure innovations have been proposed and implemented over recent decades. This chapter reviews the current state of mobility and accessibility in the region, with special attention to innovative practices and their impacts on accessibility, especially for low-income populations. Specifically, bus rapid transit and aerial tram infrastructure as well as policy innovations such as...

This research provides a novel framework to estimate the economic, environmental, and social values of electrifying public transit buses, for cities across the world, based on open-source data. Electric buses are a compelling candidate to replace diesel buses for their environmental and social benefits. However, the state-of-art models to evaluate the value of bus electrification require granular and bespoke data on bus operation that can be difficult to procure. This strict requirement on data and modeling can hinder potential collaborators on bus electrification, such as electric vehicle...

This paper presents a predictive controller for handling plug-and-play charging requests of flexible loads in a distribution system. Two types of flexible loads are defined: (1) deferrable loads that have a fixed power profile but can be deferred in time and (2) shapeable loads that have flexible power profiles but fixed energy requests, such as plug-in electric vehicles. The proposed method uses a hierarchical control scheme based on a model predictive control formulation for minimizing the global system cost. The first stage computes a reachable reference that trades off deviation from...