Simulation tools to compare and optimize mobility plans

In the last decades, cities faced considerable changes, making mobility planning a fundamental issue for their development. The city's complexity, caused by conflicting variables that influence urban behavior, makes necessary introducing a tool to forecast and evaluate the consequences of mobility plans, in order to propose plans aligned with the municipalities' goals. The aim of this research is to show how comparing two different models, based on different mobility plans, can be useful to develop or review a plan, thanks to detailed data of the use of every infrastructure, obtained through simulations. We considered samples of different urban mobility plans of the same city to show how the global behavior changes while changing infrastructures. The case study is the city of Barcelona, where in the last 10 years the municipality applied a new urban mobility plan, reviewed every 5 years (PMU 2008 and 2013). By using MATSim simulation tools, we realized two models of the infrastructure network: in both we built metro, train, tram and car networks. The main differences between the two models are the speed limit of the car network and the presence or absence of the bicycle network. By simulating the two models, we obtained data about the users for each means of transportation, the average travel time, the people traveling per hour and the average use of every station per hour. By setting a low speed limits and increasing the bike infrastructures, the results show that the average travel time decreases and the number of users of the bicycle network increases to the detriment of public and private transport. In particular, we show that the number of users of public transport decreases more than the private transport users. This behavior is probably related to the lack of bus network, not simulated in these models, suggesting that the metro network works properly only when it is integrated with a bus network.