Development of a transport model to analyse Bergamo students’ travel and analysis of Bergamo functional urban area
TRT has been commissioned by the Bergamo Public Transport Agency to conduct two analyses supporting the redefinition of the province’s extra-urban public transport service:
•The development of a traffic model with demand assignment for high school students
•An analysis of the urban functions of Bergamo’s FUA (Functional Urban Area).
The first task has been carried out using the VISUM software, applying an origin-destination matrix of the student population, for which both the municipality of origin and the school destination are known, as well as the GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) files from various bus operators.
To support this part, the information basis has been validated by cross-checking the GTFS timetables with the tabular schedules published by the operators, ensuring the correct reconstruction of service for a typical weekday in winter. Key service indicators were identified, such as bus-km for both the average day and peak-hour periods. Following demand assignment, additional indicators were calculated, including average travel time, boardings and alightings per stop, seat-km offered, and passenger-km or passengers per hour. A complementary analysis considered the comparison between regular weekday service and school-day weekday service. Different scenarios were developed and discussed with the client.
The second activity covered by the contract involves drafting a technical-methodological report to assess whether the current delimitation of the capital city’s urban area is appropriate.
Various methods and tools used or codified at national and international levels will be analyzed (e.g., the 2001 provincial resolution, the ISTAT methodology based on the OECD-Eurostat approach).
For this purpose, origin-destination data from the Lombardy Region was used, along with ISTAT databases and regional and local Open Data. This information was collected in a GIS environment to identify different territorial areas.