Promoting Public Transport Utilization through an Incentive Strategy for Dynamic Demand Management

Abstract

Seamless multimodal transport systems play a critical role in developing sustainable urban mobility. We propose an incentive-based strategy as a tool for modal shift towards sustainable mobility choices in a multimodal setting under a constrained budget. A key feature of the proposed framework is that individual origin–destination trips may be completed through a genuine combination of car and public transport, reflecting the park-and-ride travel patterns observed in real urban networks. By developing an optimization framework, we seek to maximize social benefits and network efficiency, while adhering to a budget constraint, ensuring cost-effective and scalable solutions for sustainable urban mobility. The methodology is tested on a network simulating the Jätkäsaari area, a peninsula in the city of Helsinki, Finland. The results show that, at the break-even point of the cost-benefit analysis, i.e., approximately 1 500 hours, the total travel time is reduced by more than 30%, while it peaks at 56.02% for a budget of 10 000 hours. Such results correspond to an increase in total usage of public transport from approximately 11 to 23.43 percentage points, respectively. This indicates that even a small investment in the incentive policy can result in a significant improvement in the network efficiency.