Modeling of Passenger Delays at a Multimodal Transport Access Point of a University Campus

Abstract

This study models the egress behaviour of passengers at a transportation access point with multimodal service with the objective of evaluating the delays associated with their departure from the access area. Passengers arriving at this access area have the taxi mode, minibus mode and the bus mode to choose from. A discrete choice model with the utility function based on mode fare and transit time was used to describe the egress behaviour of passengers. The resulting queues at the access area for the three modes were transient in character with time-varying arrival λ(t), time varying service rates µ(t), a truncated bulk service single channel with first-in-first out queue discipline. The queuing systems were described by M/M*/K/FIFO with random clearing of all queued taxi and minibus passengers. A computer simulation package using Runge-Kutta numerical methods was used to solve the set of linear differential equations developed for the three transport modes serving the area. The simulation models were tested with field data collected from the access area on all trips made during the study period and were analysed at fifteen minute time intervals. The probabilities of delay predicted by the simulation models agreed closely with field observations. The chi-squared test indicated that there were no significant differences between the models and the field values at the 95% significant level. Passengers at the access area experienced an average delay of 16.4minutes, 12.4minutes and 23.5minutes for the taxi, minibus and bus modes respectively. The methodology would need to be tested with data from other areas with similar demand characteristics to build confidence into it.