Intermodal
Newport Rhode Island is a major regional tourist destination with numerous attractions, 26,000 residents and 3-4 million visitors each year. Most tourists arrive by automobile. During peak visitor days, in the summer and on weekends in the spring and fall, traffic volumes overwhelm the capacity of the City's streets. Thus, managing traffic and alleviating traffic congestion is one of the City's priority issues.
The congestion problem is exacerbated by signage and the geography of Newport's roadways which requires users of nearly every attraction---the wharfs, the beaches, Fort Adams, the Mansions, Cliff Walk, the National Wildlife Refuge, the Tennis Hall of Fame---to pass through downtown and Thames St. On peak tourist days, the capacity of the city is severely limited by visitors' ability to park and move among attractions. Reducing congestion will increase the time they have to spend at attractions and in local businesses; make the experience of visiting more relaxing and pleasant; and attract additional visitors who were discouraged from visiting by capacity crowds and traffic congestion.
A new parking facility is proposed near the Pell Bridge ramps and a new water shuttle is proposed around the Harbor and to Fort Adams. These new facilities and services will be coordinated with the existing Visitor Center parking areas and trolleys to provide an integrated parking and transportation network that alleviates traffic congestion in Newport.
An integrated transportation pricing strategy is needed to encourage full use of all trolley and water shuttle transit services and parking facilities at the Gateway Visitor Center and Pell Bridge ramps and to reduce congestion and improve access to retail shops and other attractions
This project will undertake the initial steps toward creating the integrated pricing strategy. These will include 1) designing a framework for analyzing the controllable economic aspects of the transportation system, 2) conducting an inventory of the existing and planned transportation resources 3) estimating the current usage of the system by different user groups and 4) conducting surveys of the major groups (tourists, residents and commuters) to determine their responses to changes in the price and service structure of the transportation system.
July 1, 2002 Start: Framework Design, Inventory and Use Data collection begin
August 1, 2002 Surveys Begin
October 1, 2003 Data Analysis
February 1, 2003 Draft Report,
Research Proposal for Transportation Demand Strategy development.
March 1, 2003 Transportation Center Seminar on Study Results
June 30, 2003 End: Final Report
$123,835.87
Undergraduate students will conduct surveys of travelers in Newport. Graduate students will coordinate surveys and analyze data collected.
Dr. Tyrrell has been principal investigator for a variety of economic research studies of tourism in and around Newport including major surveys and analyses of the mansions (Preservations Society of Newport County), the Newport Yachting Center, Tennis Hall of Fame, and a citywide study of the economic impacts of tourism on the City. Dr. Anderson has conducted related price-searching behavior research.
The Foundation For Newport is facilitating partnerships between Newport's attractions, RIPTA and the City to encourage tourists to use trolleys and reduce traffic congestion. The Foundation's Harborfront Plan proposes water shuttles for transit around Newport's Harbor and a parking facility at the Pell Bridge ramps where tourists could park their cars. This project will demonstrate the need for, and benefit of, water shuttles and a new parking facility. It will also provide information that the partnerships can use to develop successful TDM initiatives for encouraging tourist use of trolleys, water shuttles and walking instead of automobile trips in Newport.
The Aquidneck Island Planning Commission in partnership with RIDOT, Statewide Planning and Newport has commissioned the Louis Berger Group (LBG) to develop a TransCAD transportation model for Aquidneck Island. This project will provide a basis for significantly improving the model's sensitivity to allocating mode split for tourists. The future proposal for development of an integrated transit and pricing model for the city will depend critically on the results of this study
Many communities are facing the same congestion and parking problems for tourists as those experienced in Newport. [Providence, for example has established a circulator service called the Providence Link using small RIPTA buses that look like trolleys. The Tidewater Regional Transit District provides a fixed route service through the heart of Virginia Beach connecting the beachfront attractions to remote parking areas. Acadia National Park operates a free Island Exporer bus service, allowing visitors to leave their cars parked at hotels and campgrounds, removing an estimated 40,000 vehicles from the Park's road system.]
Many other communities have developed pricing strategies to reduce congestion. [To our knowledge very few communities have attempted to develop a transportation pricing policy as an integral part of an intermodal public transit and parking system. (The TravelSmart program in the city of Perth, Australia and the Sedona/Red Rock region in Northern Arizona are possible exceptions.) There are also few transportation models that provide a good mechanism for allocating trips to different transportation modes.] We expect that our modeling techniques to build on the existing gravity model for Newport and Aquidneck Island may be useful to others who are refining mode split formulas on other transportation models.
We expect that the framework and elasticity estimates we derive will be very useful to other communities in Rhode Island, New England and worldwide in developing their own integrated pricing policy to encourage transit use and alleviate traffic congestion.
It has been estimated that traffic congestion costs urban areas and resort communities approximately $100 billion annually in the U.S. Rodier and Johnston (1997) estimated that in the Sacramento Region, travel demand management could, depending on assumptions made, defer roadway projects 7 to 24 years, save in state and Federal agencies $100 to $223 million (1992$) in roadway construction costs. But these reflect only the transportation system savings and not the benefits to users of the system.
Implementation of an integrated transportation service and pricing strategy would be the foundation of a TDM program in Newport. This program will reduce traffic congestion and:
Intermodal Transportation, Parking Pricing, Parking Management, Congestion Reduction, Tourism, Transportation Demand Management (TDM), Integrated Pricing Strategy, Transportation Modeling