LOW CARBON POLICY AND OPTIMAL STRUCTURE OF MODAL-MIX NETWORK FOR INTERCITY PASSENGER TRANSPORTATION

Abstract

Environmentally sustainable transportation becomes an important issue as well for intercity passenger transportation, where modal shifting from energy consuming airline and bus service, to energy efficient high speed railway is most feasible measure. Strategic redistribution of network-wide demand onto the improved rail links is necessary in order to collect enough income to support the railway service requiring large fixed cost. This paper presents an optimal modal-mix planning model in intercity passenger transportation, which aims to design a modal mix network minimizing the social cost, under the condition that total CO₂ emission does not exceed the given level. The proposed model is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model, which can be numerically solved by general solver programs. The proposed model was applied to the intercity network of Turkey, and used to design the network structure corresponding the different levels of CO₂ emission. It is found that, tightening CO₂ threshold increased travel times and so social cost.