Consideration of prospective passenger increases in rail transport planning phase: Case of Neckar-Alb light rail system
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School of Engineering |
Master's thesis
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Authors
Date
2024-09-30
Department
Major/Subject
Sustainable Urban Mobility Transitions
Mcode
Degree programme
Master's Programme in Urban Mobility
Language
en
Pages
92
Series
Abstract
Public transport investment requires public funding. However, to receive money from the state budgets every investment must provide proof that the involved benefits surpass the costs. Core element of the benefit determination is a prognosis of the expected ridership. A statistical analysis of past cases shows that the forecasts constantly fall short of the actual demand once the measures take up operation and that constant annual ridership growth rates between 1% and 5% are to be expected. This results in a tendency to under design rail infrastructure that is then not dimensioned for this growing demand, thereby creating negative effects for the net use of the provided public transport. This thesis aims to show how reliant CBA and passenger demand forecasting results are in the context of the ‘Standardised Evaluation Procedure’ used in German regional railway planning and what challenges their limitations impose. At the case of the Neckar-Alb light rail system an examination is performed of how robust this network is, to face unplanned prospective passenger increase. The capacity limits, critical segments and relevant bottlenecks are determined. Wherever necessary, solutions are developed and proposed to resolve these relevant constraints. The results show the limitations of CBA-tools, but also confirm their use for decision making in public planning processes. By adapting and reforming the procedures more accurate results can be reached representing the socio-economic validation and create robust transport systems to manage realistic passenger increase. The case study shows that comparably cheap expansion measures are often sufficient to provide a significant increase in capacity if preliminary measures were taken in due time. However, the funding possibilities for these far-sighted investments remain difficult and require additional refurbishment.Description
Supervisor
Mladenovic, MilosThesis advisor
Thomma, SteffenGrande Andrade, Zacarias
Keywords
public transport, ridership forecasting, cost-benefit-analyisis, capacity planning, tram-train, regional railway