Learnings from urban bus network change

Abstract

We present a strategy to improve bus service in urban networks that gives equal or better transit service and saves public resources: a win-win strategy. It consists on changing from “direct lines” to mobility centers from each quarter of the city to a bidimensional “network structure”, and from “schedule based” management to “frequency based” management. The implementation in Lleida, a 140,000 inhabitant city of Spain, has proven that it is possible to save 18% of the resources providing equal or better door-to-door service, but a final fine-tuning has found the proper equilibrium between “network structure” and “direct lines” to better fit the users’ perception, still resulting in 10% savings. Several learnings about bottom-up citizen participation, change process and perceived weight for the transfer time are presented as conclusions.