In recent years, free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) has become a significant travel mode to satisfy urban residents’ travel demands in China. This paper was designed to better understand the characteristics and influential factors of different travel patterns in FFBS. Firstly, travel patterns were divided into three categories: Origin to Destination Pattern (ODP), Travel Cycle Pattern (TCP) and Transfer Pattern (TP). Then, the characteristics of these patterns were analyzed based on a survey of 4939 valid questionnaires in Nanjing, China. A multinomial logit (MNL) model was established to explore the influential factors associated with the three patterns. The results showed the following. (1) Employees and students were more inclined to choose TP and ODP, and the selection probability of employees was larger than that of students. (2) The evening peak was more significant than the morning peak. (3) Residents with short travel distances were more likely to choose TCP and ODP, and when the travel distance reached 4 km, there was a significant transfer to TP. (4) Price had an impact on residents’ travel patterns, with residents showing an inclination toward FFBS when making short distance trips, if they were quickly found. Malfunctioning bicycles were an important factor restricting FFBS development. Several policy recommendations are proposed based on these results, for government and FFBS businesses to improve their management of FFBS systems.

Urban road maintenance is an important part of urban traffic management. However, in modern cities, road maintenance work needs to occupy some traffic resources; therefore, unreasonable road maintenance schemes often lead traffic networks to unexpected large-scale congestion. In this paper, a dynamic programming model is proposed in order to minimize the delay caused by road maintenance scheme. This model can obtain a globally optimal maintenance scheme which contains the decisions and sequence for every stage of maintenance. Each stage of this model can be boiled down to a discrete network design problem. This model helps make suggestions for the traffic managers with the request of minimizing the delay caused by the maintenance scheme. This paper uses two examples to illustrate this method, one is a small-scale Nguyen-Dupuis network, and the other one is a larger scale Sioux-Falls network.

Braess paradox is a well-known paradox in transportation researches. In urban cities, there are many different kinds of complex road networks. Unavoidably, some of them fall into the Braess paradox and it is hardly realized. In this paper, two proposed approaches are applied to find and avoid the Braess paradox in urban road networks. With the first approach, the links that cause the Braess paradox in the urban road networks with the current origination-destination (OD) matrix can be tested. The other approach is to calculate the range of the OD flows that makes these links fall into the Braess paradox. Unlike other approaches proposed in literature, this proposed approach can figure out the range of traffic demands in the networks with multiple OD pairs. Moreover, by applying these two approaches, the authors design a traffic management called link restriction which can easily figure out which link should be closed down temporarily and when to resume operation to reduce the total travel times of networks with flexible managements.

This paper presents a definition of boundedly rational confidence level (BRCL) which is the probability that a trip arrives within the shortest travel time budget plus the acceptable travel time difference (i.e. boundedly rational threshold). Using the method of data fitting, boundedly rational threshold is estimated. Then, a reliability-based boundedly rational user equilibrium (R-BRUE) model that explicitly considers both travel time reliability and travelers’ bounded rationality in the route choice decision process is proposed. This new model hypothesizes that for each origin–destination (O–D) pair no traveler can improve his/her BRCL by unilaterally changing routes. A route-based quasi-method of a successive average algorithm is developed to solve the R-BRUE model. Numerical examples illustrate the essential ideas of the proposed model and the applicability of the proposed solution algorithm.