Design of Bus Routes: Methodology and the Santo Domingo Case

Growing traffic congestion, the importance of preserving the environment, and the problems of road safety are the main reasons to consider new initiatives worldwide in designing new urban transit routes. A need exists to develop a practical methodology for the construction of a new or improved network of bus routes along with intermodality considerations. An approach for the design of urban bus routes is presented with an example of designing new bus routes for the city of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Santo Domingo has major congestion, environmental, and safety problems. The presented approach involves a framework for the construction of operational objective functions for the bus-network-design problem. This framework takes into account passenger, operator, and community interests. The methodology combines the philosophy of mathematical programming approaches with decisionmaking techniques, so as to allow the user to select from a number of alternatives. The overall formulation is nonlinear and mixed-integer programming. The bus-network-design formulation used in the case study of Santo Domingo, a city with 3 million inhabitants, involved a large network of feasible bus routes subjected to the proposed method and resulted in 84 new bus routes. With other accompanied measures, the new bus routes will change the bus system image in Santo Domingo.