Managing congestion at the entrance of subway stations with reserved inbound service

During peak hours at many entrances of subway stations, huge queues of passengers try to enter. To address this congestion, the city of Beijing has introduced a reserved inbound services in several subway stations. Passengers can reserve a time interval via which they can enter with reduced queuing. We aim to analyse and optimize this system while modelling the congestion and choices of travellers using a Vickrey bottleneck model approach. We develop a reserved system where there can be a different number of reservation time intervals before and after the preferred arrival time, and for common preferences for schedule delay adding intervals before the preferred arrival time reduces travel costs more than adding them after it. Results show that the time interval set can influence both implementation conditions and the efficiency of the reserved system. Suggestions about the time interval set are given. Passengers’ inbound choices with different inbound peak reservation costs are analysed.