Optimizing the mobility and safety of walk-and-ride systems

Agency: National Center for Intermodal Transportation and Economic Competitiveness (funded by US Department of Transportation)Researchers: Medal, H.R. (PI) and Li, X.
Amount: $99,954 ($55,036 Medal share) with $102,988 cost share from Mississippi State University
Abstract:

In the project, we investigate the effect of traffic calming measures, such as crosswalks and sidewalks on the overall cost and safety of a multimodal transportation network system design. Our design problem includes auto, transit, and walking as modes of transportation. We propose a new method for multimodal user equilibrium (UE) traffic assignment with network reconstruction, which allows for mode switching. We propose a bi- level mathematical programming model that integrates multimodal user equilibrium traffic assignment in the lower level and the network design in the upper level. The model tries to optimally implement and locate sidewalks and crosswalks considering limited financial resources to provide city planners with a comprehensive tool for planning. Due to the complexity of the problem, it requires a large amount of computational resources and therefore cannot be solved efficiently for large scale problems using state of the art solvers; hence we develop a greedy heuristic and a simulated annealing algorithm to solve large problems. The algorithms use a nonlinear complimentary algorithm to solve the UE traffic assignment. The computational results show that implementing sidewalks and crosswalks both reduces the overall transportation cost and improves pedestrians’ safety.