Morning Peak-Period Pricing Surcharge of Elderly Passengers Taking Express Buses

Abstract

This study deals with the elderly fare pricing issue for taking express buses in the morning peak period. As many elderly passengers are not commuters, fare discount policy may not be an opportune option when buses get overcrowded. Imposing surcharge on the elderly becomes a potentially beneficial measure that encourages an appropriate number of elderly passengers to circumvent the most crowded buses. The elderly pricing surcharge problem is formulated as a bilevel model, in which the upper-level model is to make the pricing surcharge decision, and the lower-level model is the equilibrium passenger assignment that represents passengers' bus choice behavior. It is classified into the special case and the generic case depending on the number of buses that impose surcharge. Several useful properties of two cases are analyzed, and a trial-and-error solution method is later developed to solve these two cases. Numerical experiments show that the elderly pricing surcharge scheme is not always applicable to all the demand scenarios, which owns a certain effective interval.