eighteen - Managing drivers and vehicles for cost-effective operations in regulated transit systems

Summary

Introduction

In deregulated transport systems, operation is often based on multiple owners of a few vehicles each providing transport services. This usually leads to on-street competition between operators to attract demand, yielding severe traffic congestion and unsafe conditions for both passengers and drivers. Through the formalisation of the industry into a few firms operating larger fleets that are required to satisfy minimum standards, the system drastically reduces these externalities. In this process, to stay in the market, firms must manage their fleet and drivers efficiently and with fewer degrees of freedom than when a firm handled just a few buses. Public transport formalisation leads to policies to meet specific levels of service, vehicle regulations and contractual conditions for workers that should be satisfied by operators, whether they are public or private agencies. Thus, formalisation usually increases operational costs (see Chapters Three and Four), increasing the fare or the subsidies needed to finance the system. However, transit formalisation also opens the door to the implementation of operational research techniques in order to optimise planning and operation of transport systems to achieve a more cost-effective network. These techniques can also be applied in already formal public transport systems.

Under large operations, attractive and flexible solutions for these planning and operational problems are much less apparent, and their impact can be huge in contrast with decisions based on very simple rigid rules. Also, these big firms reach the economic scale at which they can invest in management support tools that could improve their performance. Cost savings usually amount to around 10% of operational costs while providing similar or better service to users.

The main aspects of transit operations that operational research tools can address are the vehicles and drivers. Their associated decisions can be structured into strategic (long term), tactic (medium term) and operational (short term) planning stages (see Ibarra-Rojas et al 2015). The cost involved in providing a BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) service can be structured similarly – that is, by respectively structuring (i) the infrastructure of the streets that the bus takes and the bus stations, (ii) buses and technology systems and (iii) daily bus operations and maintenance and drivers’ wages.