Demand estimation of bus as a public transport based on gravity model

Abstract

Bus as a public transport is a suitable service to meet the travel demand between any two zones. Baghdad faced with severe traffic problems along with the development in city size and economy. Passengers have to wait lots of time during commutation to work because of the serious traffic jams. In the last years, rate of car ownership has increased as income levels have gone up and cars have become a preferable mode of transport. Bus, as the only public mode of transport available, is suffering from inconvenience, slowness, and inflexibility. A big emphasis must be given to the public transport system because it introduces an active utilization of limited resources, energy and land. This study determines the demand of public routes for buses using boarding / alighting values to generate a model and assign these demand values to the bus network. Five public routes were selected to collect the required data. Ride check and Point check survey was conducted for each selected route. The results of this study were public demand assigned to the selected bus routes, dwell time, load factor and headway. It is observed that R1 and R3 have the heaviest travel demand; they need special study to improve bus performance and make better transit. The model developed with only limited data available to predict travel demand will assist transportation planners and related agencies in decision making.