Road and Transportation Engineering

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Browsing Road and Transportation Engineering by Subject "ACBSE"

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    Evaluating the Economic Impact of Bus Stop design in Addis Ababa City
    (Addis Ababa University, 2018-04) Eyob, Hilemichael; Alemayehu, Ambo (PhD)
    Public bus transportation system plays a key role in shaping transportation structure of large and fast-growing cities most importantly in combating air pollution and traffic congestion compared to small cars. As a result; most urban transportation needs are served with public bus transportation which is also one of the most important modes of transportation in Ethiopia in general and in Addis Ababa in particular by providing intra-city transportation services with bus stations. Despite, these scattered contact points provide access, decision on how many bus stops to provide along service routes significantly influence financial & ridership performance of the agency and the community at large. For this reason evaluation of economic impacts is essential in order to have a sustainable transport system, which can be performed from efficiency and equity objectives, where “Efficiency” assumes that policies should strive to maximize social welfare while “Equity” is a highly subjective concept which assumes policies should ensure benefits and costs are spread in a fair way. Unfortunately, economic impacts of bus stop designs have not been seriously dealt with in Ethiopia; hence the purpose of this paper is to successfully evaluate the economic impacts of bus stop for selected routes. In line with this, to evaluate the perceived compromise between equity and efficiency with in local context; the impact on the primary recipients of public transit (i.e. users), nonusers to ensure equity of the system benefits and costs to the society at large and agency costs in the course of service are considered. As doing so the geographical scope of evaluation is limited to three major routes of ACBSE with fixed stop patterns whereas the temporal scope of impacts is limited to short term to minimize the effects of influencing factors. Taking bus stations as a point of interest two cases are defined: (1) Base line scenario the existing spatial distribution of bus stops and (2) Alternative scenario: bus stop location‟s that can balance of possible concerns and feasible courses of action are modelled by transit expert‟s opinion through AHP-derived weights and DCPMP to optimize bus stops in order to promote greater geographic coverage with a limit in number of stops in ArcGIS. To further understand what costs and benefits that could be related with base line scenario in the absence of change against the costs and benefits predicted in the alternative scenario in terms of service coverage, environmental effects and road user costs are examined. These key indicators used are further boiled down to reflect the magnitude and values of monetary and non-monetary costs and benefits economic effects (operating cost reductions), environmental affects, (emission reductions) and service coverage. Subsequently, the research used two different questionnaire surveys to capture the general public and transport experts opinion which are analysed in SPSS, ArcGIS for inventory of existing stops, determine accessibility & conduct suitability analysis, HDM4 to quantify the vehicle operating costs and resulting emission, online tools to calculate the VOC during idling of vehicles, IPCC guideline to calculate the carbon footprint in idling and route level fare recovery ratio to gauge the efficiency of ACBSE. The said impacts are brought together to demonstrate the overall benefits, costs and net benefits. Results in route of interest provide positive evidence on an alternative scenario that proposed change of bus stops‟ (about 8% of current stops) could increase agency direct operating costs by 4.89% as compared to baseline. Besides, vehicle fleet and idle exhaust pipe CO2 emissions decline by 12.3% from base case. Surprisingly, the gain in coverage due to elimination and addition of bus stops is large (7%) of the total population of Addis Ababa city when compared to the baseline. On the other hand, the total land required for clearing polluted air by the biosphere using tree plantation slightly decreased by 0.19% while the total sapling, land, agency management and conservation work cost for 25 years maintained by 0.19% from 621,832 Birr of baseline. While this is the case assessment on financial and ridership efficiency indicated ACBSE is recovering the direct operating cost during 2016/2017-2017-2018 from ticket sales in the case study routes. Summing up by comparing the present values of net benefit and costs the proposed alternative has greater economic worth and ACBSE service provided is moderately equitable but not efficient.