Admission Regulation of Traffic to Improve Public Transport in Urban Areas

1. Admission Regulation of Traffic to Improve Public Transport in Urban Areas Manuel Augusto Vieira Traffic Division of Lisbon’s City Hall Carlos Filipe Gomes Bispo Instituto de Sistemas e Robótica Instituto Superior Técnico

2. Outline • Introduction and Motivation • The problem • The approach • The experiment • Conclusions

3. INTRODUCTION and MOTIVATION

4. The overal picture • Cars - Explosive • Increasingly being used for daily transportation. • Increase in their number. • Roads - Deficient • Mainly radial, discontinuities, etc. • Public transport supply - Inadequate • Maladjusted supply and demand, no quality monitoring • Urban growth – Chaotic • Services in the town • Housing moving away from town

5. City of hills (space) • Lisbon – the capital city • Close to one million inhabitants • Over 3 million in the metro-politan area surrounding the city • The roads are mainly radial in between the major hills

6. City of hills (time) • Significant amount of commut-ers • The morning peak more pronounced and well defined. • The afternoon peak is “softer” and longer

7. Daily flow balance • City has a wide network of sensors • Entry gates, traffic lights, roundabouts, etc. • One day picture of flow balance at all the gates

8. THE PROBLEM

9. All gates wide open • Daily “invasion” of private cars • No tradition of car pooling • Average circulating speed of buses is below 15 Km/h (less than 9.4 miles/hour) • Public Transport “crushed” by the pressure of private trans-port

10. THE APPROACH

11. The alternative view • Main objective: to reduce the pressure exerted on the Public Transport (PT) by the Indivi-dual Transport (IT) • What is the influence of IT over the average speed of PT? • Are there bounds for the inflow of IT that will render PT competitive? • That is, average speed above 20 Km/h (12.5 miles/h), at least

12. CAMPO GRANDE 1 S.A.E.I.P. CAIS DO SODRÉ Bus route under observation

13. 880 cars/h 40% Av. Fontes P. Melo Av. Liberdade 660 cars/h 30% Av. Joaquim A. Aguiar 2.200 cars/h CT 24 Gate under observation

14. September, 16, 2002 Cars/hour vs. Bus speed

15. Speed as a function of in-flow rate

16. THE EXPERIMENT

17. February, 11, 2003 – no action

18. 200 Veic./5mm 100 5,5 % Forced 12/02/03 February, 12, 2003 – mild action

19. 200 Veic./5mm 100 18,3 % Forced 13/02/03 February, 13, 2003 – stronger action

20. Campo Grande – Cais do Sodré Vmin 15Km/h Vmin 13 % Vmin 36 %

21. Round trip Vmin=15km/h; delay=1,86 min/km Vmin 17km/h (13%) ; delay reduction of 20% Vmin 19km/h (36%) ; delay reduction of 45,7 %

22. CONCLUSIONS

23. Individual Transport Desired Speed COMMAND SIGNAL Measured Speed Controller Process Public Transport Closed Loop Control

24. The done list • Correlated individual transport flow with public transport speed; • Contributed to understand the acceptable volume of individual transport; • Demonstrated the validity of the study by conducting a real live experiment;

25. To do list • All the gates and all the bus lines; • Ways to regulate traffic: • Trough tolls • Through explicit regulation of traffic lights • Other • In any case, always a political decision; • Incidentally: • While this study was under way, Mayor decided to build a radial tunnel on the gate under study, thus increasing the ability of individual traffic to reach the heart of the city!!!

26. Acknowledgement This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (ISR/IST pluriannual funding) through the POS_Conhecimento Program that includes FEDER funds.