Multimodal Public Transport System Research Articles

Analysis of multi-modal public transportation system performance under metro disruptions: A dynamic resilience assessment framework

The well-functioning multi-modal public transportation systems play crucial roles in reducing traffic congestion, alleviating environmental pollution, and improving mobility. There are variants of disruptions that may impede the smooth functioning of public transportation systems and challenge their normal operations. It is essential to develop resilient multi-modal public transportation systems, and a reasonable resilience assessment framework serves as the foundation for developing such systems. In this paper, we propose a resilience assessment framework based on performance-based measurement metrics. We develop a dynamic simulation procedure that considers the impacts of disruptions on passenger choices of path and departure time. By incorporating these features into the simulation procedure, we can effectively model the variations of passenger flow under disruptions. Finally, to demonstrate the proposed resilience assessment framework and dynamic simulation procedure, the multi-modal public transportation system in Beijing is considered as a case study. The results reveal that the system exhibits good resistance and recovery capabilities, but it lacks robustness. Additionally, we discuss the effects of downtime, bus frequency, bus bridging services, and proportions of commuters on resilience, which lead to several valuable policy implications.

A comprehensive analysis of the electronic fare collection systems effectiveness implementation on public transit and prospective directions of its application in Ukraine

The object of research is the effectiveness of the implementation of electronic fare collection systems on public transit. Applying the electronic fare collection systems is a general trend in improving public transport services for users. In the pre-war period, the systems began to be implemented in many cities of Ukraine. At the same time, this activity was not of a systemic nature and at the current stage it is mainly considered as a means of ensuring more convenient conditions for the use of scheduled passenger transport services for passengers. The article focuses on a broader understanding of the effectiveness of the fare collection systems implementation, their role in ensuring the internal integration of the multi-modal public transport system, increasing the operational efficiency, providing the safety of transportation and increasing the attractiveness of public transit services for the population as a real alternative for the private cars to use. The implementation efficiency of the electronic fare collection systems in public transit should be expressed through various aspects. There are 9 aspects to be considered: system integration; comfort ensuring; transportation safety assistance; operational efficiency and passengers' travel time reduction; integration into the management and planning systems; implementation of the flexible fare system; conduction of the flexible fare policy; development of reasonable income distribution system; increase of the scheduled passenger transport services attractiveness. It is suggested to use systemic approach for integrated multimodal public transit system creation. It requires the development of an intelligent transport system that would integrate separate functions of the electronic fare collection system into controlling, managing and planning subsystems. The practical introduction of the solutions proposed regarding the prospects to develop electronic fare collection systems in the cities of Ukraine will make it possible to increase the efficiency of their use and contribute to the improvement of the quality of transport services for passengers.

Choice and equity: A critical analysis of multi-modal public transport services

Equity and justice have long been central in transport policy. The emphasise on the importance of individuals' access to social and economic opportunities stresses the link between accessibility and concepts like agency and freedom of choice. It calls for a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of accessibility that considers specific contextual factors that limit people's transport choices, such as the design of public transport networks and services, government interventions, and competition between public transport companies. To promote people's potential mobility and freedom of choice, it is crucial to initially assess the spatial distribution of transport options. In this article, we synthesise the findings from existing scholarship on transport choice, reinforcing the need for (re)considering choice in transport equity. We propose a metric to evaluate the availability of transport choices by considering the trade-off between time and money. By analysing household survey responses on transport choices and transit service datasets, we investigate the spatial disparities in the availability of transport choices within a multimodal public transportation system in Hong Kong and explore how adjusting unappealing choices can potentially enhance transport equity.

Evaluating public transport performance to guide public transport planning: A unified prior method

Public transport performance (PTP) depicts the efficiency of a city’s public transport. Evaluating PTP is the foundation to build a sustainable public transport system. However, extant methods are not suitable for evaluating PTP at the planning stage. This paper initiates a unified prior evaluation method that guides the planning of public transport without observational data. We represent the multimodal public transport system as a multigraph, where node function and connectivities are embedded as node property, planning specification and graph metrics are incorporated as the weight of the edge. By node convolution and node clustering, eight typical subgraphs are enumerated. Graph classification evaluates the PTP by identifying combinations of subgraphs within a region and motif analysis reveals how local transfer patterns contribute to PTP. The experiment results within Wuhan’s Third Ring Road show that our evaluation accuracy is up to 82%. We found that areas with high accessibility and equality of public transport facilities also have high PTP. From small scales (stations) to large scales (regions), PTP evolves from spatial homogeneity to heterogeneity. Using these features, urban planners can design an efficient public transport system with a point-to-surface effect and integrate ground and underground transport modes.

МУЛЬТИМОДАЛЬНИЙ ГРОМАДСЬКИЙ ТРАНСПОРТ УКРАЇНИ: ПЕРСПЕКТИВИ РОЗВИТКУ

The article discusses some common problems faced by most municipal urban electric transport enterprises that existed in the pre-war period and provides a forecast for the post-war recovery of the industry. It emphasizes that the urban public transport in Ukraine should develop based on the principle of multimodality, where schedules of different types of urban public transport are coordinated and tickets are valid for a certain period of time, allowing passengers to transfer between a certain number of transport modes. Specific measures are proposed to improve the functioning of urban public transport in Ukraine on the path to multimodality. The article also provides a brief overview of the application of multimodal transport by public transport in a number of developed countries around the world. According to the forecasts made in the article, in the coming years, public transport will become not only more technological and environmentally friendly, but also more economical due to the introduction of advanced types of public transport, various convenient forms of payment for passenger services based on contactless electronic media, the development of other transport technologies and electronic transport applications. All this, combined with modernized dispatching of urban passenger transport, route rationalization, and the optimization of coordinated schedules, will inevitably lead to the creation of a highly automated multimodal public transport system in our cities, which will make urban public transport a better choice compared to private vehicles in the future. The article provides interesting illustrative material showing how equal-sized groups of people, who are public transport passengers, use micro-mobility vehicles (bicycles) and are owners and passengers of cars in the urban space. The presented material vividly demonstrates the advantages of public transport in terms of relieving congested roads in the majority of Ukrainian cities. Multimodality of urban public transport is the decisive word in the post-war recovery and further sustainable development of our country's urban public transport.

Public transport for smart cities: Recent innovations and future challenges

The idea of a smart city is one that utilises Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies and data analytics to optimise the efficiency of city operations and services, so as to provide a high quality of life for its citizens. Due to reduced public funding, many public transport systems are already facing challenges to maintain their services. For a smart city, the goal of public transport is not simply the movement of people, but the provision and enhancement of mobility for living. This will be particularly challenging due to changes in habitation trends and work patterns. For example, the growth of mega-cities has led to extreme traffic congestion in city centres and urban sprawl on their outskirts. In order to provide sufficient coverage and frequency of service, an integrated co-ordinated multi-modal public transport system is needed, leading to substantial increase in operational complexity. Environmental concerns and the recent pandemic may also change work and commuting patterns in the future, with more people working from home and companies adopting flexible work shifts. For smart cities, public transport must offer ubiquitous access, real-time response to demand, convenience and quality service, and energy-efficient operations. This paper will discuss the challenges in network design, operations planning, scheduling and management of smart public transport systems. A brief survey of recent research and innovations will also be presented.

Voting with one's feet: Unraveling urban centers attraction using visiting frequency

Urban and regional areas worldwide exhibit a complex and uneven distribution of activities with certain areas attracting more people during different time periods. In this study we systemically classify different parts of the urban area which are most attractive as measured by their ability to attract visitors. A weekly visiting profile is constructed for each travel demand zone and thereafter clustered to identify areas with common attraction patterns. We leverage on the availability of longitudinal individual mobility traces in the form of smart card data transactions. We apply our method to the case study of the multi-modal public trans-port system of the Stockholm urban agglomeration area. The results of our clustering based on the weekly visiting profiles reveal four distinctive types of visiting attraction based on the intensity and temporal distribution of activities performed. The results of this study can be used to inform planners and decision makers about the main activity locations of travellers and how their temporal patterns vary across the metropolitan area and the design of related policies.

Unravelling individual mobility temporal patterns using longitudinal smart card data

The increasing availability of longitudinal individual human mobility traces enables the disaggregate analysis of temporal properties of mobility patterns. The objective of this study is to identify distinctive market segments in terms of habitual temporal travel patterns of public transport users. First, travel patterns are clustered using a K-means approach followed by grouping the resulting patterns into a small number of profiles using a hierarchical clustering method. Second, we construct user-week vectors that are then clustered using a Gaussian Mixture Model approach.We apply our clustering analysis to the multi-modal public transport system of Stockholm County, Sweden, using data from more than 3 million smart card-holders. Our clustering analysis resulted in 10 day-of-the-week patterns with their composition varying across the county. In addition, we identify the following hour-by-hour weekly profiles:’Weekly commuters', ‘Lower peaks',’Late travellers', ‘Early birds' and ’Flat curve’. The behavior represented by ’Weekday commuters' and ‘Lower peaks' is most persistent over weeks. We demonstrate how a better understanding of user travel patterns offers policy makers, service planners and providers with enhanced opportunities to understand and cater for diverse market segments, for example by means of tailored fare products.

Modeling and Quantifying Interaction of Information and Capacity in Public Transport Disruptions

Disruption in public transport networks has adverse implications for both passengers and service managers. To evaluate the effects of disruptions on passengers’ behaviour, various methods, simulation modules, and mathematical models are widely used. However, such methods included many assumptions for the sake of simplicity. We here use multiagent microsimulation modules to simulate complex real-life scenarios. Aspects that were never explicitly modelled together are the capacity of the network and the effect of disruption to on-board passengers, who might need to alight the disrupted services. In addition, our simulation and developed module provide a framework that can be applied for both transport planning and real-time management of disruption for the large-scale network. We formalize the agent-based assignment problem in capacitated transit networks for disrupted situations, where some information is available about the disruption. We extend a microsimulation environment to quantify precisely the impact and the number of agents directly and indirectly affected by the disruption, respectively, those passengers who cannot perform their trip because of disrupted services (directly affected passengers), and those passengers whose services are not disrupted but experience additional crowding effects (indirectly affected passengers). The outcomes are discussed both from passengers’ perspective and for extracting more general planning and policy recommendations. The modeling and solution approaches are applied to the multimodal public transport system of Zürich, Switzerland. Our results show that different information dissemination strategies have a large impact on direct and indirect effects. By earlier information dissemination, the direct effects get milder but larger in space, and indirect negative effects arise. The scenarios with the least information instead are very strongly affecting few passengers, while the less negative indirect effect for the rest of the network.

A Network-Based Model of Passenger Transfer Flow between Bus and Metro: An Application to the Public Transport System of Beijing

In a multimodal public transport network, transfers are inevitable. Planning and managing an efficient transfer connection is thus important and requires an understanding of the factors that influence those transfers. Existing studies on predicting passenger transfer flows have mainly used transit assignment models based on route choice, which need extensive computation and underlying behavioral assumptions. Inspired by studies that use network properties to estimate public transport (PT) demand, this paper proposes to use the network properties of a multimodal PT system to explain transfer flows. A statistical model is estimated to identify the relationship between transfer flow and the network properties in a joint bus and metro network. Apart from transfer time, the number of stops, and bus lines, the most important network property we propose in this study is transfer accessibility. Transfer accessibility is a newly defined indicator for the geographic factors contributing to the possibility of transferring at a station, given its position in a multimodal PT network, based on an adapted gravity-based measure. It assumes that transfer accessibility at each station is proportional to the number of reachable points of interest within the network and dependent on a cost function describing the effect of distance. The R-squared of the regression model we propose is 0.69, based on the smart card data, PT network data, and Points of Interest (POIs) data from the city of Beijing, China. This suggests that the model could offer some decision support for PT planners especially when complex network assignment models are too computationally intensive to calibrate and use.

Evaluation of passenger satisfaction of urban multi-mode public transport.

The scientific evaluation of passenger satisfaction for public transport is helpful to enhance the attraction of public transport. To improve the accuracy of passenger satisfaction evaluation for public transport and the scientificity and objectivity of the index weighting, combining the characteristics of analytic hierarchy process (AHP), entropy weight method (EWM) and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation(FCE) method, the passenger satisfaction evaluation system for Ningbo’s urban public transportation was built. The paper analyzed 5046 questionnaires on conventional bus transit and 1682 questionnaires on rail transit in Ningbo city, Passenger satisfaction for Ningbo city’s public transport was evaluated comprehensively, and the evaluation results showed that the overall passenger satisfaction of the public transport in Ningbo was 91.2 in 2019, The case study shows that the application of the AHP-EWM-FCE model on the multi-mode public transport system can objectively quantify passengers’ feelings about urban public transport service, and thus provide a theoretical basis for the improvement of passenger satisfaction in Ningbo.

Horizontal cooperation in a multimodal public transport system: The profit allocation problem

We analyse the situation involving several transport companies in an intermodal public transport system. It is assumed that they cooperate by offering travel cards which can be used on all available means of transport. In order to solve the problem of profit allocation among the companies involved, we first introduce a coloured graph which describes the transport network and then propose a game theoretical approach to share the profit among the companies. Two new allocation rules, called the Coloured Egalitarian Solution and the Coloured Cost Proportional Solution, are introduced and axiomatically characterised. Furthermore, it is shown that both solutions provide stable allocations in the sense that they cannot be improved upon by any coalition of players.

Smart card data-centric replication of the multi-modal public transport system in Singapore

This paper proposes an innovative method of replicating the multi-modal public transport system in Singapore with high precision using smart card database. It replicates the operation of public transport system with known exogenous passenger demand and provides many operational details, including passenger inter-modal trip chains, operational timetable, and detailed transfer behaviour. The paper elaborates on the methodology of the replication including data cleaning, filtering, processing and converting the collected data to meaningful information such as bus journey trajectories and metro system timetable. Thereafter, actualised passenger trip chains are directly assigned to the replicated public transport supply. The resulting replication covers almost 96% of trips made in public transport in Singapore. It provides solid quantitative information on several aspects to support decision making, including precise temporal and spatial travel demand analysis, transfer pattern analysis, traffic condition investigation and bus utilisation analysis.

The Evolution of Public Transport Policy in Hong Kong since 1981

Counting only the usable land, the population in Hong Kong is as dense as 34,000 people per square kilometer, and it has a highly efficient multi-modal public transport system. According to the experience of Hong Kong public transit system, highly reputable public transport services reveals that the the viability and sustainability of mass transit railways depend very much on accompanying transport policies and land development strategies. The ways to reduce traffic congestion from supply measures to demand management and change the transit mode from vehicle to railway are both based on Hong Kong’s actual situation. Finally this article emphasis on sustainable transport is a great experience which needs research with more in-depth thinking, and the evolution of public transport policy in Hong Kong is a good inspiration for the public transit development in the other great cities in the world.

The Evolution of Public Transport Policy in Hong Kong since 1981

Counting only the usable land, the population in Hong Kong is as dense as 34,000 people per square kilometer, and it has a highly efficient multi-modal public transport system. According to the experience of Hong Kong public transit system, highly reputable public transport services reveals that the the viability and sustainability of mass transit railways depend very much on accompanying transport policies and land development strategies. The ways to reduce traffic congestion from supply measures to demand management and change the transit mode from vehicle to railway are both based on Hong Kong’s actual situation. Finally this article emphasis on sustainable transport is a great experience which needs research with more in-depth thinking, and the evolution of public transport policy in Hong Kong is a good inspiration for the public transit development in the other great cities in the world.

The marginalization of walking, the Achilles’ heel of sustainable mobility policies in Oran (Algeria)

Oran’s agglomeration has resulted in an important peripheral urbanisation over the last two decades, followed by a considerable increase of distances travelled and an explosion of passenger car use as the principal transportation mode, to the detriment of public transport use and walking. A political will has emerged to promote public transport use by the implementation of a multimodal public transport system (bus, tram, and metro). Unfortunately, this policy has failed to address sustainable mobility development and the promotion of soft mobility, where walking, as a pillar of urban mobility, is marginalized in public spaces development. This paper aims to analyze the negative impact of the increase of passenger car use on the modal reversal of daily practice displacements and on public spaces development. Likewise, it examines the areas earmarked for walking in the new projects of public transport promotion through the study of the first tram line project in Oran, Algeria.

Environmental impacts of public transport systems using real-time control method

Public Transport (PT) systems rely more and more on online information extracted from both operator’s intelligent equipment and user’s smartphone applications. This allows for a better fit between supply and demand of the multimodal PT system, especially through the use of PT real-time control actions/tactics. In doing so there is also an opportunity to consider environmental-related issues to approach energy saving and reduced pollution. This study investigates and analyses the benefits of using real-time PT operational tactics in reducing the undesirable environmental impacts. A tactic-based control (TBC) optimization model is used to minimize total passenger travel time and maximize direct transfers (without waiting). The model consists of a control policy built upon a combination of three tactics: holding, skip-stops, and boarding limit. The environmental-related measure is the global warming potential (GWP) using the life cycle assessment technique. The methodology developed is applied to a real life case study in Auckland, New Zealand. Results show that TBC could reduce the GWP by means of reduction of total passenger travel times and vehicle travel cycle time. That is, the TBC model results in a 5.6% reduction in total GWP per day compared with an existing no-tactic scenario. This study supports the use of real-time control actions to maintain a reliable PT service, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and subsequently moving towards greener PT systems.

Predicting Short-Term Subway Ridership and Prioritizing Its Influential Factors Using Gradient Boosting Decision Trees

Understanding the relationship between short-term subway ridership and its influential factors is crucial to improving the accuracy of short-term subway ridership prediction. Although there has been a growing body of studies on short-term ridership prediction approaches, limited effort is made to investigate the short-term subway ridership prediction considering bus transfer activities and temporal features. To fill this gap, a relatively recent data mining approach called gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT) is applied to short-term subway ridership prediction and used to capture the associations with the independent variables. Taking three subway stations in Beijing as the cases, the short-term subway ridership and alighting passengers from its adjacent bus stops are obtained based on transit smart card data. To optimize the model performance with different combinations of regularization parameters, a series of GBDT models are built with various learning rates and tree complexities by fitting a maximum of trees. The optimal model performance confirms that the gradient boosting approach can incorporate different types of predictors, fit complex nonlinear relationships, and automatically handle the multicollinearity effect with high accuracy. In contrast to other machine learning methods—or “black-box” procedures—the GBDT model can identify and rank the relative influences of bus transfer activities and temporal features on short-term subway ridership. These findings suggest that the GBDT model has considerable advantages in improving short-term subway ridership prediction in a multimodal public transportation system.

Modelling spillover effects of public transportation means: An intra-modal GVAR approach for Athens

In this work, we employ the GVAR model in order to analyze demand aspects of a multimodal public transportation system. The methodology is applied to the Athens region, Greece. GVAR provides a relevant econometric modelling framework for assessing relationships between economic entities, such as transportation modes, by analyzing the relative shocks and channels of transmission mechanisms among them. According to our findings, which are consistent with the existing literature, the system of all public transportation modes in the wider Athens region, is relatively flexible to unexpected – intramodal or macroeconomic – shocks.

A Hybrid-Dynamical Model for Passenger-flow in Transportation Systems

In a network with different transportation modes, or multimodal public transportation system (MPTS), modes are linked among one another not by resources or infrastructure elements - which are not shared, e.g., between different metro lines -, but by the flow of passengers between them. Now, the movements of passengers are steered by the destinations that individual passengers have, and by which they can be grouped into trip profiles. To use the strength of fluid dynamics, we therefore introduce a multiphase hybrid Petri net model, in which the vehicle dynamics is rendered by individual tokens moving in an infrastructure net, while passenger quantities are given as vectors - whose components correspond to trip profiles - and evolve at stations according to fluid dynamics. This model is intended as a building block for obtaining supervisory control, via transport operator actions, to mitigate congestion.