Automated People Mover on a University Campus: Mobility Impact Analysis

A system to transport people into and about closely spaced activity centers continues to be an unmet need in the U.S. transportation infrastructure. New automated people movers, particularly personal rapid transit (PRT) concepts, hold tremendous potential to solve many of the mobility issues surrounding activity centers. Even as these concepts move steadily toward initial deployment, analysis tools and methodologies are lacking to compare existing mobility practice objectively with predicted practice with one of these new systems in place. Existing simulation tools are primarily limited to a single mode of transportation. Traditional ridership forecasting is mainly based on socioeconomic factors so that captive ridership can be estimated. A methodology for comparing the before-and-after effects of a proposed new transit system is introduced. The network model is multimodal and incorporates vehicle, pedestrian, and transit network and their interonnections (e.g., parking lots). Mode choice is determined simply from minimum travel time. The modeling concepts are described and applied to a midwestern university campus to evaluate the potential impact of a PRT system. Measures of system effectiveness are extracted from the model results, not just simple statistics of ridership for a particular mode of transport.