Generation and design heuristics for zonal express services

•We are introducing a type of express bus service configuration we call zonal service.•This type of service has not been studied in depth before, as far as we are aware.•We present two heuristics for designing zonal services: ZONAL-U and ZONAL-C.•We report an implementation of these tools with social savings of over 6% and 10%.•We also show that the design problem can be solved analytically for some cases.•This line of research can be extended to other types of express services. A methodology is presented for designing zonal services for a bus corridor, in which buses visit all stops in a route’s initial and final segments, skipping all stops in between. Two heuristics are described, one for congested (binding capacity) and other for uncongested cases. An experiment on a bidirectional corridor shows that the heuristics can find savings in social costs of 6.6% and 10.3% when compared to an express-service-only solution. We also show that, in some cases, the zonal service design problem can be solved analytically, outperforming the heuristics. This suggests the two approaches could be employed in tandem.