Assessment of Commuter Train Timetables Including Transfers

Abstract

Abstract Many railway networks suffer from high capacity utilisation. For scheduling all services, adjustments to the desired slots are often needed. Such adjustments might lead to longer travel times, crowded trains, longer waiting times for boarding and for transfers. All of this has an important socio-economic impact on both travellers and train operators. This raises the question of the socio-economic assessment of changes in commuter train timetables including transfers. Thus, the aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of adjustments of commuter train timetables on the traveller (i.e. consumer costs) and the train operator (i.e. producer costs). These costs are estimated based on all train trips and operations in the network. In a case study, the effect of changes in departure times (resulting in non-regular interval timetables) is analysed. Further, the price of cancelling a two-way service during different times of the day is compared. The results show that changing departure times can both decrease and increase the total costs, and that regularity for parallel services might not be as important as expected if it is kept for each separate service. For the second study, waiting times for transfers were indicated to have a (too) large impact which can lead to misleading results and might be adjusted in future work. The model is adequate for such kind of questions but needs some more adjustments. For railway networks with dense and heterogeneous traffic (as is the case in Sweden), the contributions of this model are useful for making the challenging timetabling process easier and commuter train services less costly.