Demand-responsive public transportation re-scheduling for adjusting to the joint leisure activity demand

Fixed daily trips such as trips to work/school have fixed departure/arrival times and destination points. The recurrent nature of fixed activities facilitates individuals on making more well-informed decisions about the transport mode selection. On the contrary, selecting a transportation mode for non-recurrent leisure trips, which can account for up to 60% of trips in some cities (Transport for London, 2014), is a more complex task due to the fact that individuals have little knowledge about the alternative modal options. In this paper, we try to improve the operations of demand-responsive public transportation systems by increasing their service quality and their ridership related to joint-leisure-trips via timetable rescheduling. First, we model the public transport service re-scheduling problem considering operational regulations and the quality of service. Then, a sequential heuristic method is introduced for re-scheduling the timetables of demand-responsive public transport modes in near-real time and accommodating the joint leisure activity demand without deteriorating the quality of service. The public transport re-scheduling for increasing the joint leisure activity ridership was tested in a case study using user-generated data from social media in Stockholm and the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data from Sweden focusing especially on central bus lines 1 and 4.