An agent-based evaluation of impacts of transport developments on the modal shift in Tehran, Iran

TL;DR

This study uses an agent-based microsimulation model to evaluate how transport development plans in Tehran influence residential location choices and commuting modes, highlighting the potential of subway expansion to reduce private car use.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated agent-based model combining residential and commuting choices to assess transport development impacts in Tehran.

Findings

Subway development significantly reduces private car use across socio-economic groups.

Highway development increases private car use, counteracting sustainability goals.

BRT development has limited impact on changing commuting modes.

Abstract

Changes in travel modes used by people, particularly reduction of the private car use, is an important determinant of effectiveness of transportation plans. Because of dependencies between the choices of residential location and travel mode, integrated modelling of these choices has been proposed by some researchers. In this paper, an agent-based microsimulation model has been developed to evaluate impacts of different transport development plans on choices of residential location and commuting mode of tenant households in Tehran, the capital of Iran. In the proposed model, households are considered as agents who select their desired residential location using a constrained NSGA-II algorithm and in a competition with other households. In addition, they choose their commuting mode by applying a multi-criteria decision making method. Afterwards, effects of development of a new highway, subway and bus rapid transit (BRT) line on their residential location and commuting mode choices are evaluated. Results show that despite the residential self-selection effects, these plans result in considerable changes in the commuting mode of different socioeconomic categories of households. Development of the new subway line shows promising results by reducing the private car use among the all socio-economic categories of households. But the new highway development unsatisfactorily results in increase in the private car use. In addition, development of the new BRT line does not show significant effects on the commuting mode change, particularly on decrease in the private car use.