New methods exploring urban public transport congestion using Lorenz curves

Congestion is one of the most expensive problems in many modern economies. The effectiveness of congestion mitigation strategies depends largely on our factual understanding of congestion, its nature, distribution and variability. However, current measures of congestion have been found to have limitations, such as only calculating the direct impact on motorists, and using an unfocused approach based on the performance of the whole network. Thus there is a need to find new ways to understand transport congestion. Lorenz Curves, and the associated Gini Coefficient parameter, have been developed in social science as a powerful tool to study income inequality. This research study explores if, and how, these metrics can be re-interpreted to understand the variation in the distribution of transport congestion in cities. A new concept, of using Lorenz Curve and Gini Coefficient as a new and original measure of transport congestion or transport operational performance, has been formulated. The preliminary research of this new approach has been carried out on transit and traffic applications analysing travel times and average link speeds against passenger load or traffic volume. The results show that these metrics have the potential to better demonstrate the operational performance of road and public transport networks and specify the distribution of congestion spatially.