Rural public transport is typically limited in its coverage, frequency and service period. This is often linked to a low and dispersed demand, which makes the provision of competitive transport services often financially unsustainable. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) might change this condition, allowing for an upgrade of public transport in rural areas. Nevertheless, current studies are mostly focused on urban areas, while the potential for rural applications remains underexplored. This paper contributes to this research line by developing a set of so-called AV scenarios for a potential upgrade of public transport in the rural study area of Mühlwald (South Tyrol, Italy). These scenarios are designed following three core principles. First, line-based and on-demand applications of AVs are not only individually tested, but even combined over space and time in different manners to exploit their synergy. Second, the performances of the scenarios are quantified by assuming the today´s agency cost budget, public-transport demand and peak-hour system capacity to be fixed parameters to comply with. Third, the uncertainties regarding the impacts of AVs on the agency costs are taken into account by defining optimistic, neutral and pessimistic variants of each scenario. Results indicate that the full replacement of current bus lines with a system of on-demand shared taxis might provide the highest performance improvements with the same budget as today, but only with a much bigger fleet. At the same time, the combination of bus lines and on-demand services over time (and space) might provide similarly competitive results while keeping the needed fleet size, service distance and service time relatively low. With this study, policy makers may get insights into the potential improvements of rural public transport that might be initially obtained with different uses of AVs, given a fixed agency cost budget and demand.


    Access

    Download


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    What can be done with today’s budget and demand? Scenarios of rural public transport automation in Mühlwald (South Tyrol)


    Additional title:

    Public Transp


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Public Transport ; 16 , 1 ; 295-332


    Publication date :

    2024-03-01


    Size :

    38 pages




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English





    Collective accessibility impacts of public transport automation on rural areas: The case study of Mühlwald, South Tyrol

    Dianin, Alberto / Gidam, Michael / Ravazzoli, Elisa et al. | Elsevier | 2024

    Free access

    "High-speed" delivery of Flirt EMUs for South Tyrol

    Klein, Sven / Schwarz, Dietmar | IuD Bahn | 2010


    Rural Public Transport Need, Demand and Provision: An Overview

    S. Warburton / M. Trower-Foyan | NTIS | 1981


    Automation in Today's Saw Maintenance

    Downs, D. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 1999