Prior to doing any of the GIS analysis, I felt that it was important to research what exactly makes a bus route successful from beginning to finish. Unfortunately, I found that there was very little literature on this and thus, my findings are limited. Nonetheless, from this research I discovered that the optimization of bus routes involves “infrastructure planning” which entails locating terminals, stops, depots as well as determining the size and amount of buses (Ali & Hassan, 2018).
The location of bus terminals in particular is recommended to be in regions associated with high population density with central business districts being particularly favourable (Marsousi & Pourebrahim, 2010; Cuylits, 1972). Thus, I chose to use population density and land use as criteria to determine the ideal starting point for my bus route.
In terms of the route itself, I discovered that residential, commercial, and industrial areas are preferred given their proximity to pedestrians who may be using transit (Calgary Council, 2006). Additionally, transit routes that span a large area are ideal given that more people can access them (Ibarra-Rojas et al., 2015). Thus, I chose to use land use converted into a cost surface to find the ideal least-cost bus route. Using this research as well as my own judgment was how I generated the costs for land use (i.e. residential was the most favoured while lakes/large rivers were not). Aside from this, I was unable to obtain more data on route optimization or bus terminal locations.