Intermodal intercity passenger travel for the Washington - Baltimore region (Maryland)

On a national basis, intercity travel has been subject to increasing levels of congestion and thus increasing travel times. This applies to all passenger transportation modes but most specifically to road and air travel. The thesis of this dissertation is that reducing the overhead time part of travel offers the most realistic opportunity to reduce overall travel time and make passenger transportation more efficient.; The analyses for the Washington-Baltimore region is appropriate in that it is located on the southern end of the high population density Northeast Corridor (NEC) and has an extensive intercity rail passenger system still in place. Further, extensive government funding has taken place to improve rail service in the NEC.; Notwithstanding recent rail improvements, there are still many inefficiencies in the rail passenger system in the NEC. Further, on a national basis, personal use vehicles make up 80 percent of the intercity trips of 100 miles or more (one way). The air travel mode has 17 percent. This means the rail, and intercity bus modes have less than three percent of the market.; The modal imbalance of the load that causes delay and congestion in intercity travel. For example, the 30 large hub airports in the United States (a large hub airport handled 6.3 million or more enplaned passengers in 1998) accounted for 76 percent of the total enplaned aircraft passenger load in 1998. The eight large hub airports in a 300 mile radius of the Washington-Baltimore region handled 75 percent of the enplaning passengers in the 300 mile radius. This indicates a large imbalance both nationally and locally. The resulting imbalance of high passenger loads at some of these large airports is the cause of congestion problems in many parts of the industry. The airport load imbalance is cause for airspace related delays in the aircraft landing and take-off phases. In addition, the lack of adequate airport gate spaces becomes the root cause of delay problems where weather or other factors upset the scheduled action times in the arrival and departure sequences at these high activity level airports.; Overall, the intercity passenger transportation process is fraught with mismatches in the systems that create a multitude of inefficiencies. The speed capabilities of the air carriers create situations where a disproportionate amount of time is spent in getting to and from the transport vehicle than in actually traveling. This is particularly true for shorter stage lengths (less than 500 miles). Efforts to decrease the slope of the time/distance curve (increasing the transport speed) would be better rewarded in reducing the overhead times required to access and use the transportation mode. In the case of surface transportation, the inefficiencies created by the requirements for non great circle routing plus the travel time erosions created by intermediate enroute stops pose a serious threat to the forecast time gains with high speed surface equipment. Therefore, attacking situations such as terminal access and egress times and terminal processing for all common carrier passenger modes would provide at least equal time improvement and probably at lower capital investment costs. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...