Abstract
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States was leading in the public transit sector, but following World War II, private automobiles became more affordable and gained popularity. Transportation infrastructure investments that increased road capacity further facilitated the increase in automobile use at the expense of reduced public transit ridership. With the increase of dependency on automobiles and the continuing growth of private automobile ownership and use, various problems became major challenges in big cities of USA. These include traffic congestion, air pollution, road and parking infrastructure costs, energy consumption, traffic safety, fewer mobility options for the non-drivers, and a decline in the image and use of public transit. This study uses a medium sized city, Birmingham as a case study to investigate the potential of public transit to reduce automobile trips and in turn improve the overall performance of the road network by addressing the abovementioned challenges. An agent-based simulation model was developed for the Birmingham metropolitan region using the Multi-agent Transport Simulation (MATSim) platform. Three scenarios were considered with gradually increased transit ridership to identify the benefits of increased public transit. Traffic volume, network average speed, and travel times were used as performance measures for the evaluation of the designated scenarios. Results suggest that modal shifts toward public transit and reduction in travel demand for an automobile can result in improvements in speed and travel time for all users. Therefore, investments for improving transit quality and frequency of service, as well as campaigns to improve the image of public transit and make it a mode of choice for transportation users can increase transit ridership and, in turn, improve network operations, thus are deemed worthy for medium sized cities.
Highlights
Public transit is known as public transport, urban transit, mass transit and public transportation
The results indicate that transit ridership during study time has no effect in reducing average travel time, travel time is reduced while transit ridership is increased in scenario 2 and scenario 3
The study used a comprehensive activity-based simulation model of the Birmingham area to simulate traffic operations under various transit ridership scenarios ranging from 0% to 1.1% to 5.7% to 10.1%
Summary
Public transit is known as public transport, urban transit, mass transit and public transportation. It includes a variety of transportation modes and services such as buses, trains, ferries, vanpools, paratransit, etc. 14 percent of global CO2 emissions by 2010 were solely attributed to the transportation sector [2] causing 2200 premature deaths and more than $18 billion expenditures in public health in the US [3]. The steady increase of private automobile use in the US, at the expense of transit, is attributed to many factors including the development of the US interstate system and the continued expansion of the transportation network infrastructure. When affordable housing is far away from the job location and is spread in less densely populated areas, transit accessibility becomes limited leading to increased automobile use [4]
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