Modeling of an Urban Ropeway integrated in a crowded Transit System

In many moderately sized European cities, the public transport systems based on
trams and busses are operating at their capacity limits. Ropeways have proven to be a suitable transit extension in several Latin American cities. Few travel demand models attempt to forecast the impact of urban ropeways without considering the specific properties of a ropeway.
This paper thus seeks to estimate a mode choice model that includes a ropeway as a separate transport system. Relative to bus operation in European cities, ropeways promise improved timetable keeping, with fewer delays at the start due to high service rates and they also offer improved passenger comfort with higher capacities. These benefits must be reflected in the travel demand model by mode-specific parameter settings which are estimated based on a survey. A stated choice experiment was conducted, in which participants compared realistic trip situations using a ropeway and traditional urban transport modes from aspects including access and egress time, waiting time , travel time, travel costs, reliability and crowding. The situations of choice were selected on observed trip data to be as realistic as possible. Using a mixed logit
model, the parameter estimation indicates that crowding and reliability as well as the personal attitude of potential users have a statistically significant influence on the choice behavior of people in Graz, a moderately sized city in Austria.