| High-density development in Hong Kong urban areas results in heavy concentrations of people and much conflict between the needs of pedestrians and vehicles, imposing noise and air pollution and threatening the lives of pedestrians. There is a need to alleviate these adverse effects by encouraging multi-modal transport and improving facilities for both motorized (i.e. road and transit) and non-motorized (i.e. pedestrian) modes in congested urban areas. In order to do so at the strategic planning stage, it is necessary to develop methods for assessing the impacts of multi-modal transport management policies (e.g. pedestrian-only streets, high-occupancy vehicle lanes or various transport pricing strategies) in congested transport networks with multiple modes of travel that include walking, auto, multiple transit modes and combined modes (such as park-and-ride or taxi-transit). This research appears to be the first devoted exclusively to the topic of advanced modeling for a multi-modal transport system with the integration of motorized and non-motorized transport modes.; This research intends to develop methods for modeling and optimizing transport systems with both motorized and non-motorized modes. Multi-modal network equilibrium problems need to be extended to handle combined-mode trips and incorporate non-motorized travel---walking. Based on this, the optimal selection of pedestrianisation locations should be treated as a multi-modal network design problem. As an important input data to transport models for multi-modal transport systems, the origin-destination matrix of total person trips should be adjusted using the updated observed link count information. A rigorous treatment of other multi-modal transport management policies, namely the optimal design of high-occupancy vehicle lanes and optimal transport pricing strategies, should also be provided. |
