By making a city's public transportation system completely free of charge for all users, at all times, one can dispense with fare boxes, card readers, turnstiles, and inspectors. For buses or trams, this would enable much faster boarding, and therefore vehicles would spend less time at stops. Further speedups are possible by providing wider doors, and boarding by rear doors.
Less time spent at stops means faster trip times, especially during rush hours. When each bus or tram can make more round trips in a given time period, fewer vehicles will be needed to transport the same number of people. This represents savings in both capital and operating costs.
How much speedup can be anticipated, and how many fewer vehicles would this entail? A related question would be: in going to a free public transportation system, how many more riders would use the system, and how would this vary based on the amount of trip speedup?
Dear Henry,
you may find useful to contact Sergey Suslov https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergey-suslov-457a873/ and ask for a temporary license for Anylogic. Running agent-based public transport model may be exported (with GUI) as a self-run java program.
Sergey
Thank you, Sergei! In the meantime, I found a simulation software called "Commuter" by Azalient http://www.azalient.com/whatIsCommuter.php which was purchased by AutoDesk and has been integrated into InfraWorks. I'm in the process of learning enough about this package to see whether it can provide answers to the question of whether free to all, all the time public transport is better than when there are restrictions.
You could try a package like R. However, that would require considerable programming skill/time on your part. Initially it would be much like using any programming language (Basic, C, Pascal, Fortran, etc...).
There is a program called Stella (https://www.iseesystems.com/) that might be useful. Here is one use example: http://minerva.union.edu/rices/STELLA/stella_intro.html
EU Commission recently launched a open source tool (accessible at http://www.urban-transport-roadmaps.eu/wizard) to explore and identify appropriate sustainable transport policy measures, quantify the transport, environmental and economic impacts of these measures and consider an implementation pathway (roadmap) for the policy scenario. It covers only european countries at the moment. It gives you an idea of how different policies affect the road congestion, traffic usage etc.
Thank you, Manu! That looks very interesting! I recently discovered that the Urban Planning people at McGill are doing studies in this area, eg Ahmed El-Geneidy. I have yet to contact them, though.
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