Investigating the Willingness of Potential Users to Use the Personal Rapid Transit System (PRT): a Case Study of Northwestern Towns of Shiraz, Iran

Different cities around the world including the metropolises of Iran are dealing with traffic congestion and its big challenges which are imposing huge costs to societies annually. In the meantime, various types of research believe daily commuting from the suburban areas to the Central Business District (CBD) which is mainly done by personal cars plays a big role in traffic congestion and in recent years, the city of Shiraz was not apart of this problem. On the other side, many types of research illustrate that Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) from the specifications and attributes point of view is comparable with a personal car and there is a high-level of willingness among the personal car users to use this system, specifically for commuting trips. Therefore, by considering the statistical population of personal car users in two towns located in the northwestern region of Shiraz, this research has defined its main goal to investigate the willingness of potential users to use the personal rapid transit system. This research is innovative not only from the point of view of surveying a new country and geographical area, but also from a global perspective due to the use of “stop” index, use of "total cost of ownership" index, estimating the exact travel time and exact travel distance of each respondent by car with the help of an online map and making it possible to accurately calculate the specific travel time for each respondent by PRT with the help of a specific PRT route designed and mapped by PRTsim software. For this purpose, stated preference technique was used and 432 questionnaires were collected during the survey process. Modeling process has been implemented using discrete choice models. Various findings were derived from the mentioned models. It was found that cost, access/egress time, and in-vehicle time are considered as the most important factors influencing the respondents choices respectively. In addition, results indicated that in the case of PRT implementation, 53 percent of possible personal car users will shift toward this system.