Analyse comparee de corridors importants de transport de surface a Montreal

With the rise of transit ridership and traffic congestion, transportation planners face multiple and sometimes conflicting challenges. These problems are aggravated in urban corridors, as transportation rely mainly on those structuring areas. The analysis of surface transit corridors should be a way to prepare the improvement of bus service. The results of such analyses could lead to minor service improvement such as express or limited-stop service or to major changes such as bus rapid transit or light rail transit. The analysis and comparison of corridors is more relevant than the comparison of cities that differ in many ways. The objective of this master project was to define a methodological approach and suitable indicators for the comparative analysis of corridors. This approach was applied to three corridors of Montreal.;This project began with the definition of the main concepts linked to transit corridors. The literature review also suggested some indicators used in public transportation. Then the choice of the studied corridors was driven by the bus ridership figures of the Societe de Transport de Montreal (Montreal Transit Corporation). Thus the chosen corridors were Park Avenue, Sauve/Cote-Vertu corridor, and Pie-IX Boulevard. At different stages of this project, several levels of data aggregation were used, mainly the corridor level, the segment level and the bus-stop level. Data were collected from various sources, including the 2003 Origin-Destination (OD) survey and the Canadian census of 2006. The first step of the corridors analysis was to characterize the socio-demographic context of each corridor, in other words the residents' attributes. Several methods of aggregation were tried to assign the population to a bus stop. Then the existing scheduled bus service was analyzed in order to calculate indicators evaluating the quality of service and the resources for the transit operator. The attributes of the road network were also taken into account with a simple regression model estimating the impacts of some variables on the travel time by route segment. Finally the last set of data concerned the individual trips. Thanks to the data issued from the 2003 OD survey realized in the Greater Montreal Area, the individual trips of the corridors users were analyzed using a totally disaggregate approach. It was also possible to characterize the transit users in the studied corridors. The main trip destinations, known as trip generators, were also identified for each corridor and then compared to the declared generators of the OD survey.;The relevance of corridors comparison was confirmed by the variability of results between corridors. However, more precise levels of study were necessary throughout this project, especially in the case of Park and Pie-IX corridors where certain socio-demographic variables presented higher disparity. The segment-level analysis, based upon operational routes segments defined by the transit agency, proved to be a good compromise between the route or corridor-level and the bus stop catchment area-level. The latter was defined by the creation of exclusive catchment area for each bus stop of a route. This level was useful to determine the orientation of some corridors and show their evolution during a day. Furthermore, this project also confirmed that socio-demographic or mobility indicators for a particular corridor may be greatly different from the mean values of the island of Montreal.;This work was also an illustration of the importance of data fusion based on several data sources and the use of information technologies such as geographic information systems.;Further research based on this project could include the comparison of corridors from different cities, in order to confirm the relevance of this approach. Besides, transit corridors are suitable objects for the integration of new data sets such as smart cards validations or GPS bus tracks.