Studies of transit dwell times suggest that the delay caused by passengers boarding and alighting rises with the number of passengers on each vehicle. This paper incorporates such a “friction effect” into an isotropic model of a transit route with elastic demand. We derive a strongly unimodal “Network Alighting Function” giving the steady-state rate of passenger flows in terms of the accumulation of passengers on vehicles. Like the Network Exit Function developed for isotropic models of vehicle traffic, the system may exhibit hypercongestion. Since ridership depends on travel times, wait times and the level of crowding, the physical model is used to solve for (possibly multiple) equilibria as well as the social optimum. Using replicator dynamics to describe the evolution of demand, we also investigate the asymptotic local stability of different kinds of equilibria.

对交通停留时间的研究表明，乘客上下车造成的延误随着每辆车上乘客数量的增加而增加。本文将这种“摩擦效应”纳入具有弹性需求的公交路线的各向同性模型中。我们推导出一个强单峰“网络下车函数”，根据车辆上的乘客累积给出客流的稳态速率。与为车辆交通各向同性模型开发的网络退出功能一样，系统可能会出现过度拥塞。由于客流量取决于出行时间、等待时间和拥挤程度，因此物理模型用于解决（可能是多个）平衡以及社会最优。使用复制动力学来描述需求的演化，我们还研究了不同类型平衡的渐近局部稳定性。