Analysis of Time of Day Fare Discounts on Urban Mass Transit Travel Behavior, Crowding, and Waiting Time

Every morning, commuters select the regularly dispatched urban mass transit for traveling from a residential area to a workplace. This paper aims to find an optimal discount fare and time intervals on morning peak hour. As a direct and flexible traffic economic instrument, fares can influence commuters’ behavior. Therefore, fare discount has been proposed to regulate traffic flow in different time. Two models have been analyzed to describe it with schedule delay because of the travel demand size. The first objective function is constructed on pressure equalization when the travel demand is small. The other objective function is to minimize total waiting time when the travel demand is large. In the end, numerical examples based on an artificial network are performed to characterize fare discount models