Urban Public Transportation Planning with Endogenous Passenger Demand

An effective and efficient public transportation system is crucial to people\u27s mobility, economic production, and social activities. The Operations Research community has been studying transit system optimization for the past decades. With disruptions from the private sector, especially the parking operators, ride-sharing platforms, and micro-mobility services, new challenges and opportunities have emerged. This thesis contributes to investigating the interaction of the public transportation systems with significant private sector players considering endogenous passenger choice. To be more specific, this thesis aims to optimize public transportation systems considering the interaction with parking operators, competition and collaboration from ride-sharing platforms and micro-mobility platforms. Optimization models, algorithms and heuristic solution approaches are developed to design the transportation systems. Parking operator plays an important role in determining the passenger travel mode. The capacity and pricing decisions of parking and transit operators are investigated under a game-theoretic framework. A mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model is formulated to simulate the player\u27s strategy to maximize profits considering endogenous passenger mode choice. A three-step solution heuristic is developed to solve the large-scale MINLP problem. With emerging transportation modes like ride-sharing services and micro-mobility platforms, this thesis aims to co-optimize the integrated transportation system. To improve the mobility for residents in the transit desert regions, we co-optimize the public transit and ride-sharing services to provide a more environment-friendly and equitable system. Similarly, we design an integrated system of public transit and micro-mobility services to provide a more sustainable transportation system in the post-pandemic world

Exploring equity in public transportation planning using smart card data

Existing public transport (PT) planning methods use a trip-based approach, rather than a user-based approach, leading to neglecting equity. In other words, the impacts of regular users—i.e., users with higher trip rates—are overrepresented during analysis and modelling because of higher trip rates. In contrast to the existing studies, this study aims to show the actual demand characteristic and users’ share are different in daily and monthly data. For this, 1-month of smart card data from the Kocaeli, Turkey, was evaluated by means of specific variables, such as boarding frequency, cardholder types, and the number of users, as well as a breakdown of the number of days traveled by each user set. Results show that the proportion of regular PT users to total users in 1 workday, is higher than the monthly proportion of regular PT users to total users. Accordingly, users who have 16–21 days boarding frequency are 16% of the total users, and yet they have been overrepresented by 39% in the 1-day analysis. Moreover, users who have 1–6 days boarding frequency, have a share of 66% in the 1-month dataset and are underrepresented with a share of 22% in the 1-day analysis. Results indicated that the daily travel data without information related to the day-to-day frequency of trips and PT use caused incorrect estimation of real PT demand. Moreover, user-based analyzing approach over a month prepares the more realistic basis for transportation planning, design, and prioritization of transport investments

Developing the Next Generation of Technological Aids to Effective Public Involvement in Public Transportation Planning & Design

Problem Public involvement in the design of complex public infrastructure solutions, such as a new light rail line, including stops, stations and transit centers, and associated Transit- Oriented Developments (TOD), often relies on lengthy public meetings during which the complexities and subtleties of design preferences, their articulation and communication is overwhelming to both participants and design professionals. Such gatherings can produce more confusion than clarity for the public and design professional alike, especially when strong personalities highlight differences and discourage compromise and consensus. More effective methods of discerning, developing and evaluating the nature of the public’s different preferences and perspectives, without fostering destructive confrontations, are desirable. Methodology The Transit Authority of River City’s (TARC) Transportation Tomorrow (T2) Light Rail Project is collaborating on the community-based design of a transit oriented district planned for the South Central Corridor, Louisville, KY., with the Policy and Systems Analysis Team of the University of Kentucky’s (UK)Transportation Research Center, and UK’s College of Architecture, and the Urban Design Studio in Louisville in combining virtual reality and other visualization techniques with cutting-edge decision modeling tools. Neighborhood residents provide their input to professionals through the use of anonymous electronic scoring keypads, after having helped the professionals develop the design issues about which they are queried. The public’s input is modeled mathematically to help architects, planners and other design professionals understand the precise nature of their design preferences, which then becomes one aspect of the design problem. While these user-friendly electronic gadgets are novel in themselves, it is their judicious use that enables more effective input, especially from less vocal participants. They can transform potential confrontation scenarios into collective learning experiences for the public. Members of the local community are able to quickly and easily express their views and preferences, while learning about the significant aspects of the design problem. In turn, their preferences are clearly documented and modeled so as to be useful to the design professionals charged with producing the ultimate design solution. Conclusion Used properly, this Next Generation of Technological Aids: Empowers the public participant, by providing a coherent method of both educating and soliciting input Gives the design professional measurable, qualitative information she/he can interpret and utilize in the design process Moves the design discussion from a personality conflict to a problem solution context Gives the public confidence that they can effectively contribute to the process Enhances public willingness to participate in future processes Makes community meetings more time-efficien

Timetabling for strategic passenger railway planning

In research and practice, public transportation planning is executed in a series of steps, which are often divided into the strategic, the tactical, and the operational planning phase. Timetables are normally designed in the tactical phase, taking into account a given line plan, safety restrictions arising from infrastructural constraints, as well as regularity requirements and bounds on transfer times. In this paper, however, we propose a timetabling approach that is aimed at decision making in the strategic phase of public transportation planning and to determine an outline of a timetable that is good from the passengers’ perspective. Instead of including explicit synchronization constraints between train runs (as most timetabling models do), we include the adaption time (waiting time at the origin station) in the objective function to ensure regular connections between passengers’ origins and destinations. We model the problem as a mixed integer quadratic program and linearize it. Furthermore we propose a heuristic to generate starting solutions. We illustrate the trade-offs between dwell times and regularity of trains in two case studies based on the Dutch railway network

APPLICATION OF IMPORTANCE PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS (IPA) METHOD FOR GENDER BASED PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION PLANNING IN CORRIDOR I BUS RAPID TRANSIT SEMARANG CITY

Gender-based public transport planning ensures accommodation of user group preferences to minimize inequality and discrimination among passenger needs. In the practice of accessing BRT Corridor I in Semarang City, it was identified that there were 3 aspects that determined the gap, namely: security, comfort, and accessibility. Importance Performance Analysis is used to describe the level of access gap by comparing service performance provided with passenger expectations. Of 70 respondents answered, 53 women and 17 men, two findings can be concluded. First, it was found that the value of disparity in male and female user groups was equally negative (-) which meant that services received by users were less than expected, with greater levels of access gaps for female user groups compared to male user groups with the value of the gap in women is -0.67 and in men -0.52. This shows that the problem of inequality in the female user group is more urgent to be addressed to meet adequate transportation needs and minimize the access gap that occurs in the female user group. Second, the main priority needs for handling access gaps in the female user group include accessibility aspects and comfort aspects, while in the male user group only the accessibility aspect is concerned. The role and purpose of the movement conducted are two key factors in priority differentiation

The profit-oriented hub line location problem with elastic demand

This paper deals with an extension of the hub line location problem considering demand elasticity with respect to travel times. The proposed model aims to capture the impact the hub network topology has on demand. The objective is to maximize the total revenue generated by each unit of demand using the hub line. We propose mixed-integer nonlinear formulations to model this problem. We study some properties of the nonlinear objective function associated with these formulations. Due to the inherent complexity involved in solving these nonlinear formulations with state-of-the-art solvers, we also present alternative mixed-integer linear programming formulations. Computational results compare the proposed formulations and the benefits of the presented model using benchmark instances commonly used in hub location. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis study is carried out with real data from the city of Montreal, Canada, to demonstrate the added value of incorporating demand elasticity when using the proposed model for public transportation planning

La contaminación atmosférica del transporte urbano en Arequipa : un enfoque sectorial

En Arequipa, el crecimiento de la motorización y la urbanización durante las últimas décadas se ha desarrollado con poca preocupación por los efectos en la salud y los problemas ambientales. En los últimos años, la contaminación ambiental se ha convertido en un problema de los medios de comunicación y del interés público en general, debido al aumento de las molestias causadas por la contaminación atmosférica del sector transporte, en el que el transporte público urbano tiene un gran impacto.This study has analysed the atmospheric pollution from urban transport and the different aspects that influence it. Automotive emissions are the major source of air pollution in the city. The increase in particular paratransit system and car ownership and usage has resulted in high traffic volumes and road congestion in the city centre, main corridors and avenues with environmental and health effects. This is aggravated by lack of clear legislation and regulations, inadequate public transportation planning and management, and overlapping institutions.Programa de Educación en Gestión Urbana para el Perú (PEGUP) / NUFFIC - (The Dutch organisation for internationalisation in education - The Netherlands.Tesi

Using Potential Accessibility Measure for Urban Public Transportation Planning: A Case Study of Denizli, Turkey

Policy makers and planners evaluate the implementation of the urban public transport (UPT) planning studies in terms of some objective measures such as load factor, mean volume per trip, capacity usage ratio and total capacity. In some cases, improving these measures may lead an unforeseen decrease on accessibility to the opportunities in terms of UPT users. Thus, this study aims to evaluate Potential Accessibility (PA) as an efficiency measure in decision stage of UPT planning. It widely depends on fieldwork, surveys, data inventories and existing plans. In this context, a comprehensive UPT planning has been carried out through VISUM traffic simulation software by taking the PA into account, and a four-step UPT planning procedure has been proposed. The results showed that PA may alternatively be used as an evaluation instrument in decision stage of UPT planning while the objective measures are insufficient to represent the effectiveness of alternative scenarios

A decision support system to improve service quality in multimodal rapid rail systems: A bayesian perspective

Copyright @ 2011 International Conference on Computers and Industrial EngineeringIn this study, the accessibility of the rail transit stations in a multimodal network formed by a trunk line and its feeder lines are defined. Connectivity between lines and the accessibility of the nodes identify the overall spatial structure of the network. The factors influencing the access choices of rail transit stations and satisfaction of transit travelers in rapid rail transit systems are investigated in order to gain insights into the factors and their interrelationships. The quantitative indications of the relationships are produced and the complexity of evaluating the performance of transit services is exhibited. As the interrelationships are mainly stochastic, the problem on hand is treated as a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN). A BBN approach that presents a learning mechanism is employed and is used as an alternative decision making tool to analyze the rapid rail transit services and identify policies to improve the traveler’s level of service