DEVELOPING DIVERSION CURVES FOR TRIPS ATTRACTED TO THE CBD OF FALLUJAH CITY

Abstract

This study represents an analysis for the travel patterns in Fallujah city using disaggregate approach. The Center Business District (CBD) of the city has been suffered from several transport problems resulting from rapid increasing of vehicles ownership and usage as a result to growing population, economical development in urban areas and insufficient supply of the public transport as well as the lack in parking control and the overtaken which has been made on the streets in the CBD. The study assumed that there is direct relation between the high number of private cars and the level of service offered by public transportation. This was as a motivation to study the mode choice of the travellers in the city to get a better understanding of public transport performance in the city and how it could be enhanced in order to raise the its share and make a shift from the private cars to the public transport.

The diversion curves models have been used to identify attributes of the passengers attracted to the CBD and analyze the main factors influenced the public transportation market share. These models develop a causal relationship between the travellers' characters and percent of public transport riders.

The data needed have been collected using field survey which identifies trips and travellers characteristics, it could be a good resource that gives reliable information about travel behaviour of people.

The data were analyzed using SPSS program (Statistical Package for Social Science). The results showed that the highest segment of population attracted to CBD were those with medium monthly income per household.

Diversion curves have been developed show that public transport riders who used it in regular way in their daily trips were those who have low and medium incomes while the high incomes didn’t show the same regularity in using public transport. Curves developed show that females have trends to use public transport with special characteristics of trip cost and time.

Diversion curves models show that travel time ratio (between public transport and private transport) could be the main factor affecting public transport share for work trips because of high validity the models show in estimation public transport share, while travel cost ratio could be an important factor in estimation public transport share for shopping trips.