Scheduling is a craft, whether executed manually or with computer assistance. New employees of transit scheduling departments need training in this craft to do their job, and experienced schedulers require retraining to fill gaps in their knowledge. An up-to-date scheduling guide would be useful, but none exists. The best known reference guide on this topic dates from 1946; it does not reflect modern information technology or operating conditions. Therefore, a new transit scheduling manual, suitable as text for a training course, was needed by the transit industry.

The objective of this research was to prepare a transit scheduling manual along with a comprehensive and user-friendly set of training materials.

The supplemental training materials produced in this project incorporated modern training techniques and include printed documents, computer-based training materials, and a "hypertext" version of the manual.

The primary users of the products of this research are intended to be new transit schedulers; the secondary audiences are experienced schedulers, transit planners, operating staff, and others who need to be conversant with the scheduling process. The materials describe all steps in the scheduling process.

Scheduling is the assignment of vehicles and personnel to operate transit service. The scope of this project includes fixed-route bus, light rail, and heavy rail; it excludes commuter rail and paratransit. For the purposes of this project, bus procedures are treated as the baseline. Variations applicable to rail are treated in separate sections as needed.

Status: The study findings are available in TCRP Report 30, "Transit Scheduling : Basic and Advanced Manuals." TCRP Report 30 is also available in portable document format (PDF). Double click on the files below to access the report. (A free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader is available at https://www.adobe.com.) Note: Because of the very large size of these files, it may take a long time to download. We regret the inconvenience.

Front Matter; BASIC MANUAL-Chapter 1: Service Policies and Schedule Development; Chapter 2: Trip Generation (623 Kb)

Chapter 3: Blocking; Chapter 4: Runcutting; Chapter 5: Rostering (1,069 Kb)

ADVANCED MANUAL-Chapter 1: Service Policies and Schedule Development; Chapter 2: Trip Generation (972 Kb)

Chapter 3: Blocking (962 Kb)

Chapter 4: Runcutting; Chapter 5: Rostering (1,289 Kb)