Research On Public Welfare Of Urban Rail Transit Considering Passenger Travel Behaviors

Urban rail transit has the characteristics of relatively independent road rights,large capacity,good punctuality,and low unit consumption.It has become an important solution for major cities to alleviate ground traffic congestion.Over the past two decades,China’s urban rail transit has developed rapidly.However,the urban rail transit system has large investment and high operating costs,and it is difficult for fare revenue to cover operating expenses.As an infrastructure with obvious public welfare,how to determine the appropriate price strategy and operation organization scheme of urban rail transit under different levels of urban economic development is worthy of systematic research.On the basis of analyzing the public welfare of urban rail transit,this paper studies the price transportation organization strategy that makes full use of urban rail transit resources to bring greater benefits to urban residents.The main work and conclusions of the paper include the following aspects.(1)On the basis of the existing achievements,the current situation and problems of urban rail transit public welfare research are analyzed,the connotation and manifestation of public welfare are studied,and an evaluation method of urban rail transit public welfare level considering passenger travel service is proposed.(2)A bi-level programming model for urban rail transit fare optimization is constructed.The objectives of the upper model consider the minimum total generalized cost of passenger travel and the goal of maximizing corporate profits;the lower model of multimodal transportation network distribution is established based on the improved Logit-SUE,and its constraints consider the fare rate and full load rate.Through an example,the change of ticket price and public welfare level under different objectives is analyzed.The research shows that the public welfare pricing scheme proposed in this paper can benefit the system passengers.When the fare for public welfare is reduced by 33%,the generalized travel cost can be reduced by 6%,and the total travel time can be reduced by 4.9%.The achievement of these effects is mainly due to the reduction of the fare rate of urban rail transit,which has caused some car and bus passengers to transfer to rail transit.The sharing rate of public transport decreased by 1.9%,the sharing rate of cars decreased by 1.4%,while the sharing rate of urban rail transit increased by 1.2%.At the same time,the road congestion coefficient has been reduced by 4.6%;the improvement of system efficiency has been realized.(3)The impact of urban rail transit fare and departure frequency on the public welfare of passengers under the condition of time and space imbalance is studied.Based on the spatial-temporal imbalance of passenger demand,the influence of urban rail transit ticket price and service frequency on the profit of urban rail transit enterprises and the level of public welfare of passengers is studied,a bi-level programming model that can determine the fare rate and departure frequency in different periods is established,and a hybrid genetic algorithm considering multi-core parallel computing technology was designed.Research shows that the public benefit pricing plan lowers fares by 51% compared to the basic for-profit pricing plan.Compared with the profit-targeted pricing strategy,although the corporate profit is reduced,the per capita travel cost is reduced,and the consumer surplus of passengers is increased.Compared with the profit target,corporate profit has little change in different time periods,while passengers’ consumer surplus and generalized cost per capita change more in the peak period than in off-peak period.This indicates that public welfare pricing schemes during peak hours can benefit passengers more.In addition,compared to for-profit pricing schemes,public welfare pricing schemes optimize per capita generalized costs more in the upward direction during peak periods than in the downward direction.(4)A two-level programming model considering the coordination of the interests of the government,enterprises and passengers is constructed.The upper model uses the urban rail transit fare rate at different time periods as decision variable,and from the perspective of enterprises and governments,establishes a model that minimizes the total travel time of the system under certain government fare and service level constraints;from the perspective of passengers,the lower layer established a model aiming at maximizing its own utility,and analyzed and compared the public welfare level of different pricing schemes.The research shows that differential pricing strategy(the lower limit and upper limit of peak and off-peak fare rates are the same),differential pricing strategy(peak period price increase,off-peak period price decrease),and differential pricing strategy(off-peak period price decrease)reduce the total travel time of the system by 8.23%,2.44% and3.81%,respectively.This is because these strategies may cause some road traffic passengers to switch to rail traffic,thereby reducing ground congestion and thereby reducing the total travel time of the system.However,if the price increase strategy is adopted during the peak period,the total travel time of the system will be increased.This is because although the peak price increase will cause some rail transit passengers to switch to off-peak period rail transit,it will also cause some peak period rail transit passengers to switch to road traffic.