Elastic travel demand analysis - An application to the West link railway in Gothenburg

Abstract: Today the regional railway system lacks the capacity at the central station in order to meet the demand for both the public and freight transportation. The West link is a railway infrastructure project that is expected to both increase train commuting and also increase the train capacity at the central station in Gothenburg. The purpose of this thesis work is to do an elastic demand analysis between car traffic and the West Link in modal shift to determine how many travelers will change mode. Also traffic simulations will be made to investigate the traffic conditions around the stations when the West link has been implemeted. The simulation results showed that nowadays there are congestions on the major highways and some of the smaller low capacity roads. In the future, congestions will become more significant if no countermeasures are implemented like the West link. In the elastic demand analysis the results were overall around 47% – 51% on a demand of between 350 000 – 400 000 trips. As a conclusion it cannot be said whether the West link will ease the pressure on car traffic or not. The reasons are that the population will increase about 100 000 inhabitants until 2030 and the West link is assumed by the region to have this amount of travelers each day. This would result in the same traffic pressure as today with congestions in certain parts. If the number of West link users will be around 200 000, as the results of this thesis shows, then the West link will ease the pressure on car traffic.