Designing Feeder Bus Routes: A Two-Stage Programming Model Using Existing Bus Stops

To effectively address the service gap in the first and last mile connections of metro systems, a two-stage model was developed for designing feeder bus services. The first-stage was the feeder bus stop selection model, which was used to select feeder bus stops from existing conventional bus stops. In this stage, we proposed a method to merge stops to prevent feeder bus stops from being too close to each other. The second-stage was the feeder bus route planning model, which was used to plan routes between the feeder bus stops selected in the first-stage. A two-stage heuristic algorithm was established to efficiently solve the two-stage model. The practicality of the proposed approach was verified in Harbin. The results showed that: 1) bus stop merging method could reduce the stop overlap rate by 59.32% while decreasing the stop coverage rate by only 4.07%; 2) stop selection impacts route planning, and their integration in the two-stage model could ensure optimized feeder bus services; 3) compared with the conventional model, the two-stage model could reduce the total travel time by 27.17%; and 4) appropriately increasing the number of routes could reduce the average route length. The proposed method provides a reference for designing feeder bus services.