Estimating the costs of over-crowding on Melbourne's rail system

Multi-modal demand forecasting models have traditionally ignored the problem of over-crowding on public transport, essentially treating the capacity of public transport (PT) services as infinite. In recent years PT over-crowding has become a major problem in several of Australiars cities, and is expected to worsen without major investments in public transport infrastructure. This has created a need for modelling tools which explicitly include the cost of over-crowding, to support the planning of major capacity boosting infrastructure, such as the Melbourne Metro and the Brisbane Inner Rail Solution. Over the past two years, an innovative approach to the modelling of over-crowding has been developed, overcoming previous key challenges. Traditionally, models have laveraged togetherr seated and standing passengers and have considered the crowding costs associated with outward and return journeys separately. This new approach addresses these weaknesses by including the creation of an explicit distinction between seated and standing passengers and their respective perceptions of crowding, as well as differentiating between crowding costs for outward and return journeys by jointly modelling the modal choice for both legs simultaneously. An important finding of work has been that when the crowding model is applied to the Melbourne base year (2011), the modelrs predictions of rail demands improve significantly when compared with observed patronage data. This suggests that crowding effects are already materially affecting observed travel patterns on Melbourners rail network, and paves the way for a better understanding of the costs of crowding now and into the future.