Effect of bus-lane usage by private vehicles on modal shift

Developing countries urgently need to encourage the use of public transport. With this objective, in May 2013, the government of India implemented a bus rapid transit system (BRTS) with an exclusive bus lane in a rapidly growing city, Indore. However, after 6 months of successful BRTS service, the judicial system ordered that passenger cars should be allowed in the exclusive bus rapid transit lane; this unique decision motivated the present study. The objective is to assess the impact of BRTS service on modal shift before and after the introduction of private vehicles to the exclusive bus rapid transit lane. For these two cases, separate models are formulated and compared using the binary logistic method (BLM) and the artificial neural network (ANN) method. Data on demographic and socio-economic attributes (gender, age and occupation) and trip-related attributes (travel time details and cost saving per day) are collected using a revealed preference survey. An en-route on-board survey is conducted on passengers using buses along the study corridor. Owing to the introduction of vehicles in the exclusive bus rapid transit lane, the probability of passengers switching to the BRTS is observed to decrease from 64·7% to 45·7%. Moreover, ANN provides more accurate results than the BLM in both situations.