Effective urban transport planning using multi-modal traffic simulations approach

Multi-modal transportation planning refers to traffic analysis that considers various modes of transportation mechanisms such as walking, cycling, motorcycles, private passenger vehicles, delivery cargo vehicles, public transportation modes like buses or trains, etc. Effective city traffic planning has become a challenging task involving complex behavioral analysis of multi-modal traffic scenarios. New ventures of research solutions and effective multi-modal traffic strategies should be explored to mitigate ever-rising issues related to traffic congestion. Before new solutions are to be deployed on real traffic environments, it requires recurring experiments to be carried out and comprehensive testing cycles to be passed through. Hence, simulators play a crucial supporting role by emulating real environments during trials. In this paper, we investigate interdependencies and effects between different transportation modes by simulating pedestrian movements, different private transport modes and public transport avenues and propose an effective transport planning strategy using multi-modal simulation approach. We have selected Colombo city in Sri Lanka as our study region and used SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility), a well-known microscopic traffic simulator for simulations. Our experiment results show that there are supporting strong evidences exist that interdependencies between multi-modal transportation modes contribute significantly to effective urban traffic planning.