Analysis of bus fare structure to observe modal shift, operator profit, and land-use choices through combined unified transport model

In order to design sustainable urban transport systems, the inclusion of the behaviors of different stakeholders is imperative. In this study, we formulated the interactions of behaviors between transport operator, landowner, workplace, residence, route and mode choices, and location of firms and businesses through a combined unified model of land-use and transport system. The commuters have two mode choices for traveling: private car and public bus. They are inclined to choose a transit mode with minimum traveling costs. We combined two models, maximization of operator profit constrained by bus frequency, while maintaining the formulation of other stakeholders through an assignment sub-model. The resulting formulation is bi-level, which is optimally solved for a small-sized instance containing two zones. The findings suggest that if the bus fare is reduced, the demand of public bus is increased. However, the operators’ profit is optimized within a certain range of fares and is lowered when the fare is too low or too high. It is determined that maximum bus frequency does not guarantee maximum profit to the service operator. The impacts of traveling costs on residence choice behavior suggest that if link fares are more, many of people opt not to travel between different zones. The analysis results presented in this paper are calculated for two types of link fares: a fixed fare (30 currency), and a range of link fare (5 to 100 currency). Different variants of the same formulation can be applied for real settings to better comprehend the nature of the model and its applications.