On the assessment of passenger traffic for new rail lines in the Moscow region

Abstract

The article deals with issues related to the assessment (forecasting) of passenger traffic for urban railways in the Moscow region. We are talking about the so-called Moscow central diameters (MCD) - the project of reconstruction of the existing through railway lines in Moscow and the Moscow region and the organization of the diameter routes of suburban electric trains on them. The project assumes the movement of luxury trains at intervals of 5-6 minutes. It is obvious that such a scheme will cause an increase in the number of passengers on the railways on these lines. At the same time, quantitative forecast estimates of this increase remain unknown. Similar projects (in Russia) are not available, there are also no survey values. Accordingly, the model of passenger traffic is a combination of boundary values (minimum and maximum possible passenger traffic) and heuristics, involving various scenarios for increasing passenger traffic. The paper discusses the methods of measuring and estimating passenger traffic, as well as heuristics used to estimate future demand. The limit values are the current (real) data on the validation of travel documents on existing lines and the data of mobile operators on migration flows.