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Shuttle buses along the subway lines: function of public transport in mitigating road congestion in Kunming, China
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DOI：10.1080/12265934.2025.2595988.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Improving subway-bus transfer efficiency is widely regarded as an effective way to amplify the subway network's congestion-reducing effects. However, this approach critically assumes that bus stop and route mismatches won't deteriorate road conditions. While shuttle buses enhance the subway's function, they may also become a source of road congestion, thus the assumption may not hold in practice. By deeply mining the geospatial data encompassing bus stops, routes and their topological integration with subway networks in Kunming, this article uses a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) research design to uncover how shuttle buses influence the subway's roles in mitigating road congestion. We reveal a paradoxical finding: while subway openings significantly improve traffic conditions, accompanying shuttle bus services partially counteract these benefits. The proliferation of shuttle buses along the lines has partially offset the subway' function on road congestion mitigation, introducing a new source of congestion. The results demonstrate that inefficient bus stop allocation and route duplication transform shuttle buses into new congestion sources, particularly in cities with limited subway coverage. This research provides the first empirical evidence that for cities where subway coverage is limited, simply increasing the bus infrastructure along the subway lines will bring about new unintended congestion externalities. The concluding sections give a series of policy implications for optimizing the supply structure of public transportation in coping with the urban disease of road congestion, including demand management through multimodal integration and system-wide transportation planning in policy-making.
Keywords:
Subway
road congestion
shuttle buses
regression discontinuity in time
Kunming
supply structure of public transportation
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