Presentations and Papers
Summary - Optimising Metropolitan Rail Planning Trilemma: Demand Efficiency and Investment
Presenter: Mischa Nugent
Metropolitan railways around the world face strong patronage growth caused by higher oil prices, increased road congestion, enhanced environmental awareness and many other causes. This positive paradigm shift leads to significant planning challenges for communities, rail infrastructure providers and rail operators.
However, planning the future railway, its infrastructure and rollingstock needs as well as the proposed service level is complex, multi-faceted and a trade-off between numerous factors.
The authors have developed over many years of applied rail planning a framework that assists in mastering these challenges – the Rail Planning Trilemma. This generic framework comprises of three ‘clusters of needs’ and tensions between and within these clusters. The clusters of needs are Customer needs, Operational needs and Investment needs and represent stakeholder requirements. Despite focusing on metropolitan rail planning issues in this paper, the framework is also suitable for planning other rail systems, including heavy haul, and has been applied in these fields.
In addition, the paper introduces and discusses Train Load PredictorTM and RailSys, which are helpful software tools that can assist railway planners in their daily work.
In conclusion, the demand for rail and therefore the need for rail planning will further increase. Hence, a professional, efficient and transparent planning approach is the key for a successful and competitive rail industry.
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