A multimodal approach for determining optimal public transport fares

In this paper a model for the optimisation of transit fares is proposed and tested both on a trial and a real-scale network. Formulated as a multidimensional constrained minimisation model, the problem considers a multimodal transportation system under the assumption of elastic demand for simulating the impacts of fare policies on modal split and network performance. We suggest that the proposed model is applied with the adoption of two objective functions in order to take into account all system and social costs: (transit and road) user costs, firm costs and external costs. Numerical tests show that the main constraints in fare definition are related to the size of public transport subsidies provided by public administration.