Antònia Tugores
The fundamental four-stage modelling framework on railway planning is highly focused both on modal choice models and on the assignment of passengers’ flows over networks. These last steps pursue the achievement of the maximum potential of new policies of transportation modes, constantly running towards more efficient and ecological modes. In Europe we assist at the emergence of several projects that aim to interconnect urban areas within and among countries, both with new or better-performing links and through the developing of rolling stock able to interoperate among national networks characterized by different power-supply infrastructures and signalling/security systems and protocols. Linking demand and supply is therefore a challenge to project, provide and validate better international services that are both reliable and of high quality.
We present a new approach to estimate railway traffic demand through the detection of a set of geotagged tweets overlapping railway lines in Europe. We scale the data of the potential passengers over a line through the so-called "penetration rate” and the frequency of the services to calibrate estimations on flows. Our findings provide information about passengers flows through regions, running over current methodologies that generally constrained data within single countries or administrations. Therefore the potential of the methodology goes towards the interoperability of data through countries, helping planners not only in getting a new source of cross-country demand estimation, but moreover to get a new tool and set of data for the calibration and validation of transportation demand models.
Work done by: Fabio Lamanna, Antonia Tugores, Francesco Rotoli, Pere Colet and Jose J. Ramasco
(*) Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB), Campus UIB, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain
(**) European Commission, Joint Research Centre, IPTS, Economics of Climate Change, Energy and Transport Unit Edificio EXPO, c. Inca Garcilaso 3, 41092, Seville, Spain