Benefits of informing travellers in case of extreme precipitation events: A model based case study for Zurich using MATSim

Abstract

One expected effect of climate change will be an increase in intra- and inter-seasonal weather variations, including substantially more frequent and more severe weather extremes in several parts of Europe. A substantial part of the short term total economic costs caused by extreme weather events occur through an impaired transport system. This paper applies an innovative model-based analysis of the impact of weather extremes, taking the perspective of disruptions of the urban transport system. This analysis was performed with an agent-based micro-simulation model (MatSim), applied for the city of Zurich, Switzerland. The focus of the paper is on the response(s) of agents to extreme events that can help to reduce the cost of weather extremes on the basis of timely weather prediction. Concretely we simulate a series of major traffic disturbances on the road network, as well as a public transit disruption in Zurich, possibly (but not necessarily) caused by weather extremes. For each scenario, we differentiate agent responses between nothing (worst case), rerouting, switching between transport modes, rescheduling activities as well as relocating activities. When extreme events occur, we find that adaptive response of travellers play an essential role in mitigating the cost of extreme events, reducing the cost of ‘worst case’ scenarios with more than two thirds. The most effective strategies in our model being: rerouting (avoiding congested areas) as well as making modal changes (switching to non-congested modes).