Development of a public transport management information system to assist decision-making in the restructuring of public transport in Durban

Abstract

Paper presented at the 20th Annual South African Transport Conference 16 - 20 July 2001 "Meeting the transport challenges in Southern Africa", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa. ABSTRACT: The national flagship project to restructure the public transport system of the Durban Metropolitan Area consists of various planning and modeling processes that are based on surveys of the public transport system and its users. The overall project, which is described in another paper by the Durban Unicity Council, is very dependent on decision-makers’ and planners’ understanding of the current supply, utilization, and trip patterns of various public transport modes as contained in the Current Public Transport Record (CPTR)of Durban. To assist decision-makers in extracting synthesized information from a massive database such as the CPTR, the Durban Unicity Council decided to make use of a Public Transport Management Information System (PTMIS) developed by Stewart Scott. PTMIS is a menu driven GIS viewer providing easy access to public transport information in a GIS environment that allows for interfacing with the central GIS system and other databases. A user-defined SQL and band width query facility on all link geographic features are also provided. Various functions were added to PTMIS as part of the project: PTMIS was adjusted to accommodate and query the public transport origin-destination (O-D) matrix in addition to the route-based CPTR information. The O-D information was required for the strategic public transport demand model that was developed to evaluate various integrated multi-modal network scenarios. PTMIS was subsequently used to assist with the network demand modeling process by providing the CPTR information for the calibration of the EMME/2 model and subsequently by displaying the modeled passenger and vehicle volumes on a GIS base map in PTMIS for the visual assessment of alternative scenarios. PTMIS also proved very useful in the design of the user preference surveys as it provided easy access to view the main corridors for each mode, for selected corridors. The paper describes PTMIS by means of thematic maps and graphical information of Durban’s public transport system and how the system was used to assist decision-making for the restructuring project. Further developments of PTMIS to assist in the various implementation phases are also described. These are a route financial feasibility module,a link with the National Traffic Information System (NATIS) and the Provincial Registrar’s taxi permit data bases to assist with the allocation of taxi route permissions, and a contract design and monitoring module.