Comparison between public-transport service and private-car mobility across macro cities worldwide with future perspectives

Abstract

Although we are in the era of advanced technologies and intelligent communication systems, still many macro cities in the world are facing serious traffic congestion, pollution and road accident problems. Many studies on different policies and alternative solutions to ease these traffic-related problems were and are carried out; the main issue of these studies is to find solutions to avoid the growth of private car (PC) use. Certainly the alternative to the heavy use of PC is an attractive public transport (PT) service. In this research we compare between the existing PT and PC in macro cities worldwide and examine under which conditions and scenarios PT can be better than the PC, and vice versa. A new methodology is developed to attain this comparison. The methodology is based on traffic assignment modeling for the investigation of the different travel times associated with PC and PT. In order to create the comparison between PC and PT, we use the simulation-based software CITILAB. The data collected from macro cities are inserted into the CITILAB to compare between the travel time and cost of PC and PT from each city centre, at PM peak hour, to different regions of the city. Furthermore, we study the possible improvements that can be established for the PT service to make it better than the PC. Our simulation results reveal that the PT service can compete better with the PC if its connectivity issues will be improved to allow for approaching a seamless move between origins and destinations. Along the line of searching when and how the PT can be better than the PC, we created a future scenario to find out how many autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be needed to replace 1000 PCs. This future perspective assume the use of AVs by two alternatives: moving directly from origins to destinations by individual AVs, and moving by individual AVs from origins to a PT-related AV system, and then by this PT system to the destinations. The results show that the AVs can save parking spaces at the origin and destination areas, can increase car-usage efficiency, and can save travel time compared with the nowadays existing PCs. The amount of vehicles required for the AVs is much less than those required today for the PCs because of the increased efficiency.