Evaluating The Economic Impact Of Bus Stop Design In Addis Ababa City

Public bus transportation system plays a key role in shaping transportationrnstructure of large and fast-growing cities most importantly in combating airrnpollution and traffic congestion compared to small cars. As a result; most urbanrntransportation needs are served with public bus transportation which is also onernof the most important modes of transportation in Ethiopia in general and inrnAddis Ababa in particular by providing intra-city transportation services withrnbus stations. Despite, these scattered contact points provide access, decision onrnhow many bus stops to provide along service routes significantly influencernfinancial & ridership performance of the agency and the community at large. Forrnthis reason evaluation of economic impacts is essential in order to have arnsustainable transport system, which can be performed from efficiency and equityrnobjectives, where “Efficiency” assumes that policies should strive to maximizernsocial welfare while “Equity” is a highly subjective concept which assumesrnpolicies should ensure benefits and costs are spread in a fair way. Unfortunately,rneconomic impacts of bus stop designs have not been seriously dealt with inrnEthiopia; hence the purpose of this paper is to successfully evaluate therneconomic impacts of bus stop for selected routes. In line with this, to evaluaternthe perceived compromise between equity and efficiency with in local context;rnthe impact on the primary recipients of public transit (i.e. users), nonusers tornensure equity of the system benefits and costs to the society at large and agencyrncosts in the course of service are considered. As doing so the geographical scopernof evaluation is limited to three major routes of ACBSE with fixed stop patternsrnwhereas the temporal scope of impacts is limited to short term to minimize therneffects of influencing factors. Taking bus stations as a point of interest two casesrnare defined: (1) Base line scenario the existing spatial distribution of bus stopsrnand (2) Alternative scenario: bus stop location‟s that can balance of possiblernconcerns and feasible courses of action are modelled by transit expert‟s opinionrnthrough AHP-derived weights and DCPMP to optimize bus stops in order tornpromote greater geographic coverage with a limit in number of stops in ArcGIS. To further understand what costs and benefits that could be related with basernline scenario in the absence of change against the costs and benefits predicted inrnthe alternative scenario in terms of service coverage, environmental effects andrnroad user costs are examined. These key indicators used are further boiled downrnto reflect the magnitude and values of monetary and non-monetary costs andrnbenefits economic effects (operating cost reductions), environmental affects,rn(emission reductions) and service coverage. Subsequently, the research used tworndifferent questionnaire surveys to capture the general public and transportrnexperts opinion which are analysed in SPSS, ArcGIS for inventory of existingrnstops, determine accessibility & conduct suitability analysis, HDM4 to quantifyrnthe vehicle operating costs and resulting emission, online tools to calculate the rnVOC during idling of vehicles, IPCC guideline to calculate the carbon footprint rnin idling and route level fare recovery ratio to gauge the efficiency of ACBSE.rnThe said impacts are brought together to demonstrate the overall benefits, costsrnand net benefits. Results in route of interest provide positive evidence on anrnalternative scenario that proposed change of bus stops‟ (about 8% of currentrnstops) could increase agency direct operating costs by 4.89% as compared tornbaseline. Besides, vehicle fleet and idle exhaust pipe CO2 emissions decline byrn12.3% from base case. Surprisingly, the gain in coverage due to elimination andrnaddition of bus stops is large (7%) of the total population of Addis Ababa cityrnwhen compared to the baseline. On the other hand, the total land required forrnclearing polluted air by the biosphere using tree plantation slightly decreased byrn0.19% while the total sapling, land, agency management and conservation workrncost for 25 years maintained by 0.19% from 621,832 Birr of baseline. While this isrnthe case assessment on financial and ridership efficiency indicated ACBSE isrnrecovering the direct operating cost during 2016/2017-2017-2018 from ticketrnsales in the case study routes. Summing up by comparing the present values ofrnnet benefit and costs the proposed alternative has greater economic worth andrnACBSE service provided is moderately equitable but not efficient.

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