Development of an Approach to Improving the Passenger Transport Routing Scheme in a Large City

Despite high importance of mass passenger transport for ensuring mobility of urban population, the current period is characterized by a pronounced shift in priorities in implementation of measures for development of the transport system of a large city towards private transport. Along with impossibility of maintaining high rates of construction and reconstruction of the main street and road network, such a position regarding urban planning results in significant overload of almost the entire transport infrastructure of a large city. In the opinion of most experts, key measures aimed at stabilizing the transport situation in cities should comprise implementation of a policy of active development of the mass passenger transportation system. Among the issues of organizing passenger transport operation, the most interesting is the procedure for tracing routes followed by subsequent development of a rational routing scheme, since in many respects the urban passenger travel time will depend on the results there-of. Improvement of the passenger transport routing scheme, considered in relationship with development of the city’s main street and road network, will allow achieving the required level of convenience by increasing traffic flow speed. After reviewing domestic and foreign works devoted to the study of urban transportation systems, it was found that the known methods of development of passenger transport routing schemes do not fully consider the interaction of traffic flows with urban main roads. Often, experts pay insufficient attention to optimization criteria that allow a comprehensive analysis of rationality of routing schemes options. Analysis of the requirements for bus routing, the choice of priority directions for their development and convenience of movement made it possible to generalize the principles of designing routing schemes and to assign criteria for their optimization. It has been established that speed is the most significant criterion for optimizing transportation systems, considering the peculiarities of the organization of traffic flows on the road network of a large city and its transport and operational conditions. Based on the routing experience accumulated over almost a century, an approach has been developed to reasonable assignment of measures for reorganizing the routing scheme, which allows us to consider the factors that determine the technical condition of the road network and the characteristics of traffic flows. Its general idea is to connect separate links of the transport network and to sequentially develop a set of competing route options, one of which will later be included in the rational routing scheme.