Strategic Multimodal Assessment of Suburban Transport Infrastructure

Railway networks around medium-sized agglomerations in Europe face two major challenges: increasing capacity demands around the cities on the one hand and service cuts and infrastructure backlogs in more remote areas on the other hand. This paper presents an innovative three-stage multidisciplinary, iterative methodology for jointly handling demand, timetable, and infrastructure development. An intermodal transport model allows prediction of future intermodal transport demand taking demographic and structural changes into account. Sensitivity analyses are carried out to find the optimum of passenger frequency, infrastructure measures, and costs by varying travel time, stopping patterns and frequency, but also alternative bus services. This methodology has been applied to three railway networks, yielding infrastructure strategies ranging into the future as far ahead as 2045. Despite structural differences, the UITP goal of PTx2 could be achieved with sets of only moderate, yet targeted infrastructure measures for all three examples.