A Practical Approach to Assess Design of Urban Transit Vehicles Using Microscopic Simulations

The design of urban transit vehicles is a key component which determines the overall capacity of a line in public transportation. Hence, optimizing the process of boarding and alighting as well as passenger flows inside a vehicle is of vital importance. Vehicle designers need to assess and compare their design choices by predicting passenger flows in typical situations. Since field tests involving real or mock-up vehicles are expensive in terms of costs and time, microscopic simulations have proven to be a valuable tool. In this paper the authors demonstrate simulation methods that allow for investigating passenger flows in different designs of urban transit vehicles. Together with BOMBARDIER Transportation LRV, they applied their simulation methods on three different vehicle layouts and discuss which information can be extracted based on several graphical representations. Their modeling approach implements passenger movement behavior for boarding and alighting processes on the operational, tactical and strategic level. The authors validated their simulation results against measurements of crowd flows obtained from experiments and real world observations.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP015 Transit Capacity and Quality of Service.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Kogler, Christian
  • Seer, Stefan
  • Matyus, Thomas
  • Stubenschrott, Martin
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 15p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Boarding and alighting; Microscopic traffic flow; Mobility; Passenger traffic; Simulation; Urban transit; Vehicle design
• Uncontrolled Terms: Passenger flow
• Subject Areas: Design; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; Vehicles and Equipment; I91: Vehicle Design and Safety;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01515880
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-3626
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 25 2014 9:15AM