Ridership Effects of PRT with Mass Transit

Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) offers driverless, on-demand and non-stop travel over a network of dedicated guideways separated from other traffic. During early stages of introduction, many public transport trips require transfers to/from scheduled route services by bus, tram, subway or train. This paper describes a model for trip assignment and transit mode split estimation in mixed transit networks. If non-transit modes remain unchanged, changes in transit disutility contain sufficient information to estimate increased transit ridership. The mixed mode assignment has been integrated in the generic PRT simulator ”PRTsim” and has been applied in a case study of PRT mixed with scheduled bus services in Umea Sweden. Results show that the first stage introduction of a PRT network not only attracts trips from private cars to PRT but at the same time may attract more trips to remaining bus services. In a Swedish case study, full implementation of PRT is estimated to more than double transit ridership.