A Comparison Between Conventional and High-Priority Bus Services in Davao City, Southern Philippines

Abstract

The increasing demand for transport system in Davao City has paved the way for the proposal of two transportation options, namely, the conventional bus service (CBS) and high-priority bus service (HPBS). A necessary step for transport policy making is quantitatively determining the differences between these transport options. In this study, we compare the projected performances of CBS and HPBS in terms of their expected load factor and passenger waiting time at chosen stations in Davao City. Our assessment is based on the data gathered about the existing public transport system at eight stations in the Mintal area during the morning rush hours. A single server batch service queueing model was adopted in this study to approximate the passenger waiting time at a station for each transport option. Passenger arrivals are fitted to a Poisson distribution using least square methods yielding a headway/service time of 3 min and service frequency during the observation period is 40. Our results show that though the load factor of CBS is higher than the HPBS, it fails to meet the passenger demands at some stations, which resulted in increased passenger waiting time.