AN INTEGRATED MASS TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM PLANNING ON ZONAL BASIS

Abstract

In the analysis of passenger travel demand there are two fundamental distinctions that can be made between the types of transportation systems. First is the urban transpor tation system, and the second is the regional (intercity or interurban) transportation system. In the interurban transport demand analysis, the travel can be long-haul and short-haul. The travel behaviour between the two types of travel are quite different. Firstly, the long-haul travel is usually performed by public transportation system and is less elastic with respect to transport system characteristics than shorthaul travel due to the limited extent of travel mode choice. In short-haul travel the routes are fixed but often there is a choice of travel mode. In preindependence era, the transportation system in India was developed keeping in view the administrative and strategic needs of that time. After independence the plan proposals were developed to cater the needs of freight traffic and no systematic efforts were made to analyse the interurban travel demand pattern. Traffic forecast at coarse level was started by the Indian Railways with the First Five Year Plan. In this study attempt has been made to analyse the travel behaviour of short-haul interurban travellers. The 11 analysis of short-haul travel demand approaches the comple xity similar to that of urban travel. The spatial and temporal pattern of short-haul travel is fairly uniform round the year. The only option open to short-hau] Interurban traveller is the choice of mode out of several available travel modes. District Saharanpur is selected as the study area. The interurban trips within the study area are essentially short-haul trips. The mode choice situation in the study area by and large is bimodel except trimodal choice situation at one urban centre. Most of the interurban trips in the study area are directed to Saharanpur urban area which happens to be the district headquarter and is the main centre of socio economic activities in the district. The aim of this study is to develop interurban mode choice model that is policy oriented. With the paucity of funds and the several trans port sectors competing for the allocation of public funds, it becomes more so important to analyse the mode choice beha viour of interurban travellers in developing countries like India. The mode choice process in short-haul interurban travel is similar to the urban case. Disaggregate mode choice model based on logit formulation is more flexible, simple and best suited to the binary choice situation, and as such has been adopted in this study. The analysis in this work Ill is organised into three major areas; model calibration, post calibration analysis including aggregate prediction and the application of the model. The study area is divided into two similar mode choice situations. The choice based sampling technique was adopted for conducting on board surveys at the terminals i.e. railway stations, bus stations and IPT stands. Subjective estimates of system attributes have been used as data input in the models. Factor analysis on the district census data is carried out to identify broad market segments of interurban travellers. The two broad components of population dI: interurban travellers, having homogeneous activity patterns are identified as urban and rural travellers. At a finer level, further stratifica tion of urban population based on profession as proxy to the income variable is also done into self employed, employed and other workers groups. Self employed and employed subgroups are also formed into a supersubgroup with the typology of main workers. Separate mode choice models are developed for each segment of population and several specifications of transport system attributes are tried. Successful model calibration is achieved by the maximum likelihood technique and it is brought out that the models developed are satisfactory at reasonable IV level of confidence. The successful model in each case revealed that only travel time and out of pocket cost are the two reley vant variables important in the interurban mode choice process. Useful information on value of travel time'of different segments of population has been derived from these models. The question whether a travel demand model can be transferred to other urban areas is of obvious relevance to the transport planners. Appropriate statistical tests of the equality of various estimates are applied to test the transferability of the models developed in this study. The variation of modal demand with che changes in level of service of public transportation system is also analysed by incremental logit analysis. Three sets of curves showing the changes in mode choice probabilities for a range of variations in level of service are developed for binary and trinary mode choice situations in the study area, for the different segments of population. The internal consistency of the logit model is tested by the validation of IIA property at the trimodal choice situation. The short-haul interurban trips are essentially multi purpose trips and the travellers are not much concerned with system attributes like conform, convenience and privacy etc. The interurban travellers value different components of travel time as equal. The value of travel time of rural travellers is quite low than their urban counterparts, which shows the socio-economic disparities between these two segments of Indian population. The interurban travellers are more sensitive to travel time rather than out-of-pocket cost. The modal split curves developed in this study provide a systematic analysis and quantitative results of interest to the transport system managers and planners.