Sustainable urban transit network design

•A TRNDP with environmental considerations and electric buses is developed.•A direct route design approach, a steady state GA and a route evaluation procedure are applied.•A real world case, in the city of Heraklion (Crete), Greece is used as example application.

Sustainability is a requirement for modern public transportation networks, as these are expected to play a critical role in environment-friendly transportation systems. This paper focuses on developing an efficient model for solving a sustainable oriented variant of the Transit Route Network Design Problem. The model incorporates sustainable design objectives, considers emission-free (electric) vehicles and introduces a direct route design approach with route structure and directness control. An application in a real world case, highlights the performance and benefits of the proposed model.