Strategies to decongest areas of south mumbai using congestion pricing and through public transport improvements

Abstract

Congestion is a phenomena which has now became an integral part of travelling in peak hours of the day in today’s global cities. Situation gets worse if the available road infrastructure is poor and city doesn’t has a required fleet of public transport working in standard conditions or is overburdened in few cases. Now a days the concept of downtown doesn’t exist in most of the cities. For every specific service you have one dedicated part of the city which also helps in fair distribution of the trips taking place in the city. For my research I have chosen the financial capital of India where all above written conditions exist and while the concept of downtown is still valid in Mumbai’s case, making it a complex city in terms of transport planning interventions required to tackle the congestion in the city. This research is based on using a variety of travel demand management measures such as congestion pricing, high occupancy vehicle lanes and introduction of new high capacity public transport service inside the study area. The idea of using various travel demand management measures has been based on the effectiveness of congestion pricing in Singapore, London and various other cities, effectiveness of HOV lanes in making optimum use of the road space and forcing people to use car pool. Apart from this the proposal of new public transport was based on the findings from the case studies of London, Singapore, Stockholm where before the introduction of congestion pricing the services of public transport was enhanced for people to shift to an alternative mode of transport once congestion pricing gets implemented. The first stage of research was to find the exiting amount of congestion plying on roads inside the study area during morning and evening peak hours. For this purpose use of travel speed based various indices such as congestion index, travel time index and planning time index has been used and levels of congestion during morning and evening has been observed. The next stage involved calculation of the marginal congestion cost. This has been calculated on the basis of the speed flow relationship, value of time of the four wheeler users, speed of the vehicles at a certain stretch of road and the count of PCU running on that similar stretch Strategies to decongest areas of south Mumbai using congestion pricing and through public transport improvements making the marginal congestion cost dynamic in nature. The dynamic congestion pricing was found to be more effective than the flat congestion pricing in many cases during the study of literature. The calculation of the marginal cost was followed by the prediction of the modal shift. For the prediction of modal shift an online survey was carried out which was even cross checked by the multinomial logit model. After getting the results of modal shift the final stage where delineation of HOV lanes and introduction of new public transport mode was initiated. The HOV lane delineation was based on certain parameters such as bus frequency in peak hour, availability of road space etc. whereas the bus routes which was running parallel to the HOV lanes and have a poor capacity by demand ratio (the ones which was over crowded) during the morning peak hours were selected for introduction of new high capacity public transport services which consisted of the double decker buses at a desired headway. Finally at the conclusion part the congestion costs for the study area has been calculated.