Operational characteristics of a bus service and their modification due to a safety-driven acceleration limit.

Active transportation can greatly benefit societies by improving people’s health and well-being. Buses are a form of active transportation; however, their high level of acceleration can make private vehicles less attractive to users. Even worse, it can be responsible for severe injuries that require
hospitalization or for the development of fear of falling, especially to the older ones. A level of bus acceleration that does not exceed 1 m/s2 has been proven appropriate as evidence has shown that it enables passengers to move in a natural way inside the moving vehicle, hence reducing instability, non-collision injuries and increasing safety. Although operators might be willing to
implement such an intervention, they might also be skeptical about its impact to the operational characteristics of a service, such as timetabling, in-vehicle travel times, passenger waiting times etc. In this work we investigate the effect of a safety-driven acceleration limit to the operational characteristics on a random round trip of a bus service in London. Data regarding speed, acceleration,
journey time and stops were recorded at 2Hz and extracted from the engine of a bus. Further computation resulted in passenger waiting times and headways between the examined bus and its preceding and following buses. A vehicle movement model was used to test how these operational characteristics would be affected if the safety-driven acceleration limit of 1 m/s2 were to
be implemented. The derived results suggest that the difference between the current bus service (do-nothing) and the case that the safety-driven acceleration limit is imposed is not considerable, and a discussion of the results is provided.