Planning and Analyzing Transit Networks: An Integrated Approach Regarding Requirements of Passengers and Operators

Abstract

19 Providing an equally sufficient and efficient transit service requires careful planning and permanent monitoring of service quality, operating costs, and revenues. These requirements need a model that is capable of determining impacts on passengers as well as operators. Additionally, it is important to provide suitable and powerful methods to design and to modify the transit network. The transport planning software VISUM attempts to fulfill these requirements. In contrast to conventional Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which are extended to provide specific functionality for transit planning, VISUM is a comprehensive transportation model with additional GIS functionality. It seeks to fill the gap between conventional GIS programs and vehicle scheduling programs. Introduction Demands for a competitive public transport that offers alternatives to private transport with minimal public subsidies call for a planning process that considers the impacts on passengers and operators. To passengers, good service quality means: • short travel time, • minimum number of transfers, • good service frequency, and • reasonable fares. Operators and transit agencies must provide service in an economically efficient way. They need to monitor the performance of the existing service and forecast the impact of proposed measures. The operator, for example, needs to know the: • required fleet size, • operating costs, • revenues from tickets, and • cost coverage that indicates whether public subsidies are necessary. These requirements of passengers and operators describe the fundamental conflict in transit planning. To solve this conflict, the transport planner needs to find an acceptable balance between two incompatible planning objectives: the maximization of service quality and the minimization of operational costs and public subsidies. For this complex planning task, transport planners started to apply software approximately three decades ago. Today, they can select from a variety of software tools for strategic planning, the most common of which are Comprehensive Transportation Models (CTMs) and GIS.