More and more people want to travel by public transport. In the Utrecht province, a densely populated area in the centre of the Netherlands, public transport demand is high. Together, all busses and trams serve around 200,000 users a day. In this presentation, we focus on how the Provincial government Utrecht developed its public transport network in order to meet this increased demand and the expectation of travellers. In addition, we describe the next steps towards a new public transport contract for our future operations.
There are multiple challenges for the future such as improving the connectivity of core economic areas and supporting the accessibility of new housing developments. In addition, there is a challenge to relieve the crowdedness at our main transport hubs and to improve the first-and-last mile. Therefore, the Provincial government Utrecht is exploring network restructuring and expansion such as a new public transport ring around the city that connects secondary nodes, a new BRT or tram connection to the southern suburbs and a new secondary railway node with national rail services. With regards to the last-mile, we would like to emphasis recently studied conduct in collaboration with Delft University of Technology.
The central topic of this study were the preferences of PT travellers to use shared modes in the last-mile. We found that mainly younger people consider the use of shared modes in the last-mile. Given the considered modes: bicycles, e-bikes, e-scooters and e-mopeds, most travellers seem to prefer the cycling modes. This and other scientific research helps us in our efforts towards future public transport.
