Once unplanned urban rail disruptions occur, it is essential to evaluate the impacts on public transport passengers since impact estimation results enable transit agencies to verify whether alternative transit services have adequate capacity to evacuate the affected rail passengers and to adopt effective emergency measures in response to the disruptions. This paper focuses on estimating the impacts of unplanned rail line segment disruptions on rail passengers as well as original bus passengers, as the latter are overlooked in existing studies. A method of identifying affected rail passengers based on passenger tap-in time is proposed, which is helpful for evaluating the scale and origin-destination distribution of the affected passengers. Passengers’ response behaviors are analyzed and modeled in a multi-agent simulation system. The system realizes the simulation of the multimodal evacuation process, in which a rule-based logit model is employed to describe passengers’ travel selection behavior and the Monte Carlo method is utilized to address the issue of uncertainty in passengers’ travel selection. In particular, the original bus passengers are integrated into the simulation and interact with rail passengers. Finally, some indicators assessing the impacts on rail passengers and bus passengers are presented, and a case study based on the Ningbo urban rail transit network is conducted.

This paper focuses on the bus bridging service design in response to an unplanned metro line segment disruption. An integrated optimization model is constructed to address both bus bridging route layouts and bus resource allocation. Diversified routes, e.g., stop-by-stop route, express route, skip-stop route, parallel to the disrupted line segment are applied in the optimized bridging scheme to best respond to the passenger demands. An event-driven simulation-based genetic algorithm is designed to solve the optimization model. The simulation method is introduced to handle the uncertainty of passenger waiting time and the randomness of bus dwelling times at bridging stations and control the bus station capacities and guarantee the feasibility of the bridging schemes. Finally, the effectiveness of our proposed approaches is verified in a case study. Sensitivity analyses explore the impacts of fleet size and route diversity on the bridging performance. The results are instructive for transit agencies to operate bus bridging services.

This paper proposes a novel model to optimize the first train timetables for urban rail transit networks, with the goal of maximizing passengers’ transfer waiting time satisfaction. To build up the relationship of transfer waiting time and passenger satisfaction, a reference-based piecewise function is formulated with the consideration of passengers’ expectations, tolerances and dissatisfaction on “just miss”. In order to determine the parameters of zero waiting satisfaction rating, the most comfortable waiting time, and the maximum tolerable waiting time in time satisfaction function, a stated preference survey is conducted in rail transit transfer stations in Shanghai. An artificial bee colony algorithm is developed to solve the timetabling model. Through a real-world case study on Shanghai’s urban rail transit network and comparison with the results of minimizing the total transfer time, we demonstrate that our approach performs better in decreasing extremely long wait and “just miss” events and increasing the number of passengers with a relatively comfortable waiting time in [31s, 5min). Finally, four practical suggestions are proposed for urban rail transit network operations.