Matthew Connor and Matt GrabowskiJanuary 7, 2010

ORFE 467: Transportation

PRT Network for Gloucester County

Gloucester County is located in the southwest part of New Jersey, highlighted in red in the figure above. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Gloucester has a total area of 337 square miles, including 325 square miles of land. It has an estimated population of 255,673 as of the 2000 census, and is relatively dense with 785 people per square mile. The population is fairly evenly spread across the county, except for several regions with littler or no development at all. The age breakdown is shown in the table below.

Table 1 Age BreakdownDemographi

c Total number of people Percent of PopulationUnder 18 67498 26.418 to 24 22755 8.925 to 44 77725 30.445 to 64 57782 22.6

65 and older 29914 11.7

Demographics for Gloucester County are summarized below.Demographic Statistic

Number of families 67221Number of households 90717Persons per household 2.77

Median Household income $72,316

Median Family Income $85,532 Per Capita Income $30,893

Mean Travel time to work 28 minutes

There are several large companies and attraction in Gloucester County that account for large numbers of attractions for the PRT network that was designed. These are listed in the table below.

Attraction CityUnderwood Memorial Hospital City of Woodbury

Rowan University GlassboroSony Music Pitman

Deptford Mall DeptfordHeritage Glass Musuem Glassboro

Hollydell Ice Arena SewellCommerce Bank Arts Center Sewell

Education data in Gloucester was also found. According to available New Jersey Gloucester County data, there are a total of 171 educational institutions, including 82 public grade schools, 39 private grade schools, 16 public high schools, 30 private high schools, 2 colleges or universities, and 2 business or vocational schools.Listed below are some of the larger schools that the network will need to cover if it is going to successful and serve meaningful trips.

Rowan University 9578Gloucester County College 5863

Washington Township High School 3000Clearview Regional High 1,603

Williamstown High 1,876

To be a successful PRT, these popular attractions and schools must be included. Furthermore the two medical centers, Underwood Memorial hospital and the Kenney medical facilities must be linked as well.

Lastly we checked Gloucester’s current transportation system. Around 93% of people use private transport although over 18% work outside the state and 36% work outside the country. The bus services are not well connected. Bus routes

include 9 regional interstate and two intrastate. There are no transit stops in the county itself.

Municipalities to be Served

Clayton (borough)Deptford TownshipOak ValleyAlmonessonJerichoEast Greenwich TownshipElk TownshipFranklin TownshipFranklinvilleGlassboro (borough)Greenwich TownshipGibbstownHarrison TownshipMullica HillRichwood

Logan TownshipBeckettBridgeportCenter SquareNortonvilleRepaupoMantua TownshipBarnsboroSewellMonroe TownshipVictory LakesWilliamstownNational Park (borough)Newfield (borough)Paulsboro (borough)

Pitman (borough)South Harrison TownshipSwedesboro (borough)Washington TownshipTurnersvilleWenonah (borough)West Deptford TownshipThorofareWestville (borough)Woodbury (city)Woodbury Heights (borough)Woolwich Township

1) PRT System Design

As detailed above, Gloucester County consists of 171 schools and over 1700 attractions. To design a successful and economically feasible PRT two major initiatives must be undertaken: 1) to design a system that serves 90% of people quickly and 2) to be economically feasible. Productions (homes and populations) are in yellow. Business’s are in blue and orange represents schools. It is difficult to fully capture these placemarks however these are the trip ends the PRT must connect to be feasible and successful.

To meet the two major goals, the PRT system will require many stations located throughout Gloucester to successfully get people to start using PRT rather than driving. Furthermore, it is important people can get to destinations rapidly else they will choose another mode of transportation. To assure this, the system was designed so that people can progress quickly around the system until they are close to the final destination. This is similar to how a highway works-you can quickly cover great distances until you are in the town you live in at which time you get off the highway and navigate several turns on back roads until you are to your destination. Each station ideally needs to serve enough people to pay for it, as well as being able to cover the substantial cost of guide way for the PRT system.

Since there are no, or very limited, transit stops in place in Gloucester, the PRT will be an entirely new design.

2) Building an Initial Network

Gloucester consists of many housing (productions) and attractions located in small clumps evenly distributed around the county.

Below is a figure showing the productions and attractions of Gloucester County in Google Earth marked by place marks. This data was collected from the previous year’s files and has proven to be fairly accurate, however much of the attraction estimates for businesses cannot be verified. Please note that the patrons per day visits to businesses in Camden were estimated. Rather than just expecting 100 times the number of workers as the number of patrons (this seemed too large), we instead based the estimates on the max of a normal distribution with mean (0.5*number of workers) and standard deviation equal to the number of workers. In this way we would never have negative patrons, but also would get some good, reasonable variation in how many people visited each business. The results of this method can be debated, however the numbers seemed fairly logical.

The distribution of productions and attractions made it easy to build small networks and then to link up these networks with others streamlining travel throughout the county. The population and attraction density however, had a drawback in that the guide way length ended up being quite long as the entire county had to be

interconnected to make it a usable system. Furthermore the networks required a great deal of stations and interchanges to make sure users were able to get from home to work and easily move about Gloucester County.

This is a sample of a smaller network that is connected to the entire PRT system. The stations are strategically placed around areas of with lots of attractions or productions (in this case housing-productions) so that people can get off and on close to their ideal location. The station serves productions and attractions with a 0.25 miles radius so the stations must be properly spaced out so as to not interfere with another station (not always possible) but not too far if in denser regions.

The interchanges allow for “highways,” where the PRT can quickly connect through and bypass this small network to get to another place in the county, yet the interchanges permit a person to “get off” the highway and quickly go to their final destination.

This is the skeleton from which the entire network is built. I went around Gloucester County creating small networks like the one above. If we can successfully implement these smaller networks in larger cities and dense areas first, following the design proposed above it would be relatively easy to build out from these starting points to other small networks created nearby. This approach is advantageous because using small, interconnected networks is great for inner cities (where it has always been relatively straightforward to create networks) but also works well for less dense areas where there may only be a need for a few stations.

Building around small networks and linking these up via interchanges creates an opportunity to start with the big cities, but easily adapt to smaller cities.

To connect these networks I use interchanges. In this way people can quickly cover great distances (as they don’t need to stop in any particular small network) until they get to the network that has their final destination when they switch lines and proceed on.

An example of such a highway and “de-ramping” is shown in the image below.

The center interchange can be thought of as a hub. Although it is a bit difficult to see the central interchange connects several networks to one another. This connections go both ways and go into other interchanges so that a person can go from their station, get onto an “on-ramp” going to the central interchange and proceed to the next interchange, use this setup of interchanges to take an “off-ramp”, proceed into a small network, and finally their station destination.

I now show the lower half and upper halves of the final PRT network. It is too difficult to see the final network but the images below show the “highway” route through the county and some of the features of the small networks and how they are interconnected.

Lower Half:

Upper Half:

Network Statistics

The designed PRT system for Gloucester had a total of 543 stations and 256 interchanges. This corresponds to a ratio of about 2.12:1, respectively. The total guideway length needed to connect the nodes in this network was 1254.24 kilometers, or 779.35 miles.

Network Statistic ValueStations 543

Interchanges 256Guideway 779.35 miles

Stations:Interchanges 2.12:1

The PRT system served 1,365,089 / 1,559,426, or about 87.5% of all trips, close to the 90% threshold we wanted for the network. Below is a summary of all possible trips in the county:

Possible Home Trips in county : 1,022,692Possible Work Trips in county : 220,464Possible Student trips in your: 216,612Possible (Non-Student) Patrons trips in your county : 98,678

Attached below is a summary for each station, breaking each stations trip ends down by type. It is also noted the ultimate PRT design services 84.17% of productions and 94%of attractions.

Cost of Network

Cost per station=$2 millionTotal Cost of stations = 543*$2 million = $1.09 billion

Cost per mile of guideway = $5 million Total cost of guideway= 779.35 * $5 million = $3.9 billion

Cost per vehicle = $100,000 Trips per person per day= 4The network reaches roughly 215,200 people with an average of about 523,026 trips per day. For the analysis please see accompanying Excel spreadsheet.Total number of vehicles needed for our system by multiplying the total number of trips by 15 percent (the percentage that occur during rush hours) and dividing by 10 (the maximum capacity of each car).Total Cars =8630Total cost of cars=8630*$100,000 = $863 millionTotal Cost of Network = $5.846 billion

These results are summarized in the following table:

Costs Number Cost per TotalCars 8630 100000 $863,000,000

Guideway 779.35 5000000 $3,896,750,000 Stations 543 2000000 $1,086,000,000

 Total Network     $5,845,750,000

Annual Recurring CostsThe annual recurring costs for employees to run the system, maintenance, and an annualized value to pay off capital costs is summarized below:

Annual RevenueSetting the fare to $3 a trip as well as factoring in station leasing and naming rights, the revenue of the system per year is summarized below:

Paying for the System

Based on the above computations, the network designed runs at a yearly loss of $173 million. This system will not be able to be paid off as it is currently designed.

ConclusionsIt seems a PRT for Gloucester is not viable given the above analysis. Although the system has been successfully built to accommodate close to 90% of all trips in Gloucester county, the cost of doing so far exceeds the benefits.

There are several rooms for improvement in the current design. First and foremost, many of the stations serve numbers of people that absolutely cause them to operate at a substantial loss. This was necessary to achieve the percentage level of 90 that was required for the PRT network. Furthermore the strategy and design required substantial use of guideway, which is the source of most of the cost of the PRT. Future PRT designs should concern themselves with minimizing the cost of guideway and find alternative paths and routes to achieve less guideway.

Appendix:Distribution of station ridership:

1 23 45 67 89 1111331551771992212432652873093313533753974194414634855075290

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Trip ends served per stationGloucester County

Highest to lowest

Tri

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Toal TripsPeak hour

Trips(per day) (per day)

523,026 78,454