Light Rail Hubs in a Multimodal Transport Environment

In an increasingly multimodal urban transportation environment, not only route design and system insertion of light rail systems alone, but also the design of multimodal hubs, are of crucial importance. The integrated design of light rail infrastructure and other modes of transport always need to be tackled on a network-wide scale to gain a maximum network effect.
In this paper we first identify the most important success factors by evaluating classical planning strategies found in the literature. This shows that there are several very basic, yet crucial success factors. An integrated management and planning framework is essential for achieving an integrated multimodal transportation network. Timetable-oriented network design together with attractive transfer conditions for passengers have also proved to be important. One factor is the location of a hub that needs to align with urban sub-centers, so local demand attractors form synergies with passengers transferring at the hub. When designing the hub itself visibility, accessibility, safety as well as security and comfort aspects need to be considered. Our methodology contains a 3-stage framework to integrate light-rail within a transit system via hubs. A multimodal, activity based travel demand model, timetable design and route network design affecting track, platform, and station geometry are described. Only a tight integration of travel demand modelling, urban planning, operating and design of public transport as well as road infrastructure planning can lead to the successful establishment of multimodal hubs. Quantitative and qualitative performance indicators are given for various hubs in Central Europe to analyze their performance.