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If our future is to be green and sustainable for our planet's ecosystems (and us), public transit will have to play a bigger role. It's simply a more efficient way to get large amounts of people around, especially for commuting in and out of cities during rush hour. But optimizing large and complex networks of trains and buses isn't as easy as it might seem. There are lots of moving pieces, and one small delay for one vehicle can snowball into a system-wide delay. The longer the average delay is, the less attractive transit becomes to commuters who need to know they can count on getting to work on time.
EU Research to the Rescue
Thankfully, in the past years a lot of progress has been made on this type of real-world problem, and more effective algorithms have been developed. One of those was created by the ARRIVAL project, an EU-funded initiative.
"The ARRIVAL project received EUR 2.6 million of its EUR 3.2 million total cost from the information society technologies (IST) section of the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). It brought together researchers from 12 universities in Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland with the French rail company SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français)."
Photo: Flickr, CC
What are the Results?
"The algorithms have not only cut waiting time between trains from four minutes to two on the Berlin underground network, but have also been used to draw up a new timetable for the Dutch national railway system, which handles 5,500 trains per day. In Switzerland, the system has been used to optimise a schedule so that additional trains may operate on high-risk sections of track, while trials at the Italian stations of Palermo and Genoa have reduced delays by 25%. "
A couple minutes might not seem like much, but averaged over thousands of trains, it can mean a very big difference. If you go further and multiply those minutes that would otherwise have been wasted by the number of passengers on those trains, you get thousands and thousands of hours that aren't being lost by people waiting around at stations.
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