Tactical design of high-demand bus transfers

We use micro-simulation to assess five tactical designs seeking variance reduction of a high-demand transfer stop that resembles a representative case of Transantiago, the public transportation system of Santiago de Chile. We explore: demand splitting, route differentiation, offline holding, online holding, and prepayment; all of which are applied locally at the transfer stop, and affecting only the feeders. We analyze the impacts over operators and users, both at the transfer stop and downstream, finding that online holding has the best performance overall. These findings were robust to various changes in the simulation assumptions. The paper finishes discussing implications of these results for public policy design, and possible extensions of this research.