Bus schedules cannot be easily maintained on busy lines with short headways: experience shows that buses offering this type of service usually arrive irregularly at their stops, often in bunches. Although transit agencies build slack into their schedules to alleviate this problem - if necessary...

This paper shows that evacuation routes, such as a building's stairwell or an urban freeway, may discharge inefficiently if left unmanaged, and that setting priority rules can speed up egress. Therefore, a simple control strategy is proposed. The strategy is decentralized and adaptive, based on...

This paper describes the network shapes and operating characteristics that allow a transit system to deliver an accessibility level competitive with that of the automobile. To provide exhaustive results for service regions of different sizes and demographics, the paper idealizes these regions as...

This paper studies how items with different characteristics, and being demanded at different rates from a finite number of supply points, should be transported to a common destination. The items may differ in size and value, and the origins may differ in their spatial distribution, the kind of...

This paper shows how moving obstructions in (kinematic wave) traffic streams can be modeled with "off-the shelf" computer programs. It shows that if a moving obstruction is replaced by a sequence of fixed obstructions at nearby locations with the same "capacity", then the error in vehicle number...

This paper proves that the solution of every well-posed kinematic wave (KW) traffic problem with a concave flow-density relation is a set of least-cost (shortest) paths in space-time with a special metric. The equi-cost contours are the vehicle trajectories. If the flow-density relation is...

This paper shows how idealized models can be used to obtain cost-effective, implementable solutions to large and complex logistics problems. It advocates the use of fine tuning software to translate the guidelines produced by idealized models into specific feasible solutions. The "traveling...

Many types of storage systems require goods to be stacked in a storage area. The amount of handling effort required to retrieve individual items from the stacks depends on stack heights and on the adopted storage strategy. The paper focuses on container import operations at marine terminals. It...

High occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes are restricted-use freeway lanes reserved for vehicles with more than a predetermined number of occupants. This paper examines the physics of HOV lanes placed on median lanes, with open access everywhere. HOV lanes can affect the capacity of freeway bottlenecks...

This paper presents a simple physical principle that can be used to solve the kinematic wave problem for freeways with special lanes and priority vehicles. The principle is shown to yield the flows for all possible 'Riemann problems' arising in a homogeneous highway, so that its application in a...