The object of research is the public urban passenger transport route. One of the most problematic places in the organization of transportation on a fixed city route is the establishment of the planned trip duration and/or round trip. Difficulties arise because the trip duration on a city route is usually a random variable, which must be taken into account when establishing its planned values, used later when scheduling traffic. This, on the one hand, makes it possible to increase the efficiency of the use of route vehicles by reducing their unproductive outages, and on the other hand, to improve the quality of passenger service by reducing the waiting time for the last transport at stops. During the research, the method of stochastic optimization of the planned trip duration is used. This makes it possible to find a compromise in terms of value between the efficiency of using route vehicles and the quality of passenger service. A feature of the proposed optimization method is the consideration in the generalized costs of unproductive idle times of route vehicles, the lost profit of the transport operator and the cost of transport time for passengers. The application of the developed method for the conditions of the trolleybus route No. 14 of the city of Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine) allows, in comparison with the existing planned indicators, to reduce the total costs by 12 %. Now the technical possibilities of collection, accumulation and processing of empirical information on the conditions for performing transportation on urban routes using satellite systems of global GPS positioning have significantly expanded. In such conditions, using the developed method, it is possible to take operational account of the operational and socio-economic factors in the planning of passenger traffic in which these transportations are carried out.