A long-term analysis of passenger flows on a regional rail line

Abstract

Promoting rail systems can represent a useful policy for rebalancing modal choices and reducing private car use, especially in high density contexts. Obviously, an increase in passenger numbers is only possible if generalised costs (i.e. a weighted sum of times and monetary costs) associated to public transport are abated. According to the recent literature and current professional practice, most strategies for achieving this objective are based only on infrastructural interventions which may be unfeasible or inadequate in densely populated contexts. Likewise, the adoption of policies based on replacing existing fleets or reducing fare levels entails increases in national or regional subsidies, which would be difficult to achieve in the current economic climate.\ud Hence, our proposal is based on investigating effects on travel demand arising from the replacement or upgrading of existing signalling systems (both in terms of trackside and on-board equipment). Indeed, the recent European Union policy to create a single transnational interoperable rail network imposes the development of innovative signalling systems. In this context, since cost-benefit analysis has to be implemented to verify the economic and environmental feasibility of the proposed intervention strategy, an appropriate method should be developed to estimate passenger flows according to future configurations. In this paper, we propose a method to determine travel demand in current and future contexts by appropriately processing data from Italy's national census on mobility, population growth forecasts and turnstile counts. The proposed approach is applied to the regional ‘Naples–Sorrento’ rail line serving the metropolitan area of Naples in southern Italy in order to show its feasibility

A Passenger-Oriented Optimization Model for Implementing Energy-Saving Strategies in Railway Contexts

“…Clearly, the procedure is carried out for any of the considered confidence levels. The travel demand was estimated by means of traditional approaches proposed in the literature (details on the travel demand estimation in the case of the analyzed line may be found in [74,75]. Likewise, we adopted the commercial software OPENTRACK [76] as train movement simulator.…”

Assumptions and simulation of passenger behaviour on rail platforms

“…finally, further studies could profitably investigate effects in terms of OD (i.e. origin-destination) matrix estimation (see, for instance, caropreso et al [36], cascetta et al [37], Di mauro et al [38]) by means of flow counts in the event of adopting the two different behavioural approaches.…”

A Multi-Criteria Analysis as a Rational Evaluation Process for Building a New Highway in Italy

“…through the EU guidelines), reducing the risk of planning fallacy; however, CBAs tend to underestimate non-monetary impacts (externalities). For example, there are environmental impacts, landscape impacts and the social impact [4]- [7]. On the contrary, the MCA is more suitable for non-users and non-monetary impact estimation, but there are no national and/or EU official guidelines: This does not allow standardization of procedures, increasing the risk of planning fallacy.…”