Evaluating incentives for public transit in large gatherings

Large crowds at events disrupt city transportation networks, and incentivizing public transit to mitigate these impacts remains challenging. This paper presents a method to design and assess public transit incentives for large events. This is done by first developing a traveller mobility model that describes how information from routing apps data, public transit fare and frequency guides the choice of travellers between two modes and updates the traffic state based on their mode choice. Traveller’s wait time, departure time, public transit capacity, road capacity, road congestion, and parking capacity of private vehicles at destination are all considered when updating the number of users who completed their trip. The influence of public transit fare and frequency on the population’s overall travel time, modal split and parking overcapacity is studied, along with the influence of the ratio of travellers informed with routing apps. Finally, incentives are selected by including operational cost and user satisfaction in an optimization approach.