A method for the design of optimal transport strategies

This paper presents a methodology for the design of optimal transport strategies and demonstrates its application to six UK cities. An objective function representing the total welfare of a transport strategy is used to measure the performance of the strategy; the levels of policy instruments in a strategy, such as changes in public transport fares and frequency, are chosen such that the objective function is optimised. Two types of analysis are reported: sensitivity tests around individual policies to examine their relative impacts, and optimisations of packages of transport policies. The effects of spatial variations of the PT policies in the optimisations are also investigated.