Reservation-based commuting management from a community to a subway station considering travel time uncertainty

Managing commuting flow from residential communities to subway stations is particularly challenging due to travel time uncertainty, which disrupts both commuter travel patterns and station inbound behavior. This study proposes a reservation service for the community-station commuting scenario, enabling the coexistence of reserved and unreserved channels. The service is expected to provide more stable travel and efficient entry via dedicated reservation channels. A bottleneck model is developed to incorporate travel time uncertainty into the community-station process, analyzing its influence on demand split, departure time, and queuing time. From both commuter and operator perspectives, the implementation boundary of reservation services is explored, and an upper bound for the unit reservation cost is derived. Given specific parameter settings, the feasible travel time range, demand split, and demand-to-capacity ratio for each channel can be analytically determined, providing decision support for operators considering the deployment of reservation services.