Evaluating the Economic Impact of Bus Stop design in Addis Ababa City
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Date
2018-04
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
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.
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Keywords
Addis Ababa, Bus Stop, Efficiency, Equity, ACBSE, GIS, AHP, EIA, DCPMP