Morris County PRT Proposal

Ivan Kleinfeld ORF 467 Final Project January 11, 2011

Introduction

Established on March 15, 1739, Morris County is now the seventh largest county in the state of New Jersey. It is noted for its median household income of $77, 340, which makes it the sixth wealthiest county in the United States by this metric. Morris County has an area of 481 square miles, and had a population of 470,212 according to the 2000 census. Although large portions of the county are home to residential and suburban areas, 53 Fortune 500 companies maintain a presence in Morris County, including AT&T, Pfizer, Honeywell, Novartis, BASF, and Verizon. As a result, 57.8% of Morris County residents do not leave the county when commuting to work. For those who do leave, many travel to neighboring Essex and Passaic County or into Manhattan. Additionally, Morris County does see an influx of commuting workers everyday as only 50.1% of workers employed in Morris County live in Morris County. Thus, when designing a PRT network integrating the Morris County network into other counties’ networks will be critical to developing a successful network.

Transportation

Currently, 19 stations on New Jersey Transit’s rail network serve Morris County. Additionally, Morris County is also home to the New Jersey Transit / Morris County Bus System, which consists of eight routes that serve the county. Overall, though, only 4.2% of Morris County residents use public transportation while traveling to work, while 81.2% travel by car, truck, or van while driving alone. When compared to the rest of New Jersey, Morris County residents do show a reluctance to use public transportation. In New Jersey, 9.2% of residents use public transportation to travel to work. Obviously, there is ample room growth with regards to public transportation in Morris County; I would, however, be worried that residents simply might be reluctant to embrace public transportation.

The most important thing to note on the data is that it is simply is an estimate, especially with regards to the data on businesses. My first step upon receiving the data file was to remove all duplicate entries. This took an extremely long time, as schools were entered in the business as well as education category and many businesses were listed multiple times. After accomplishing this to the best of my ability, I tried to improve upon the existing numbers for people, visitors, and enrollment. With regards to education, I kept the existing enrollment numbers, but needed to improve the people column. I decided to divide the enrollment column by twelve. This assumes a student/teacher ratio of twelve, and ignores administrative employees. Although this is a simplistic measure, it was better than was had previously been there. Next, for businesses, I found a table that listed the top employers in Morris County:

I used this table to fill out the top employers; if an employer had more than one location, then I tried to split the total number of employees between the locations as sensibly as possible. Then, I made sure that no other people values for businesses were greater than the smallest value in the table. I also found the total number of employed people in Morris County to be 276,965 and made sure the total number of people in the business category was close enough to this value. With the regards to the patron column for businesses, I took this be too difficult to improve upon. I simply looked for any extreme values and tried to make sure that none existed. Lastly, I did not alter the recreation data points, and updated the transportation data points so that the people column represents the daily ridership at each New Jersey Transit station. Initial Network

In order to see if PRT would be feasible for Morris County, I began by designing two separate networks in two of Morris County’s denser areas. As one can see from the figure below, Morris County contains large areas of low-density residential areas in which a PRT network might not be feasible because of the potentially large distances between stations. At the same time, though, Morris County does have high-density areas with commercial and residential zones in close proximity to one another. Therefore, for my initial network I decided to focus on the Morristown and Dover municipalities.

I built two separate networks that would make use of a loop structure. In total, this initial network contained 31 stations, 9 interchanges, and 30.67 miles of guideway while serving 270,795 trip ends. Below I have enclosed pictures of first the Morristown network and then the Dover network. I have added the station coverage circles to give a better idea of the relative size of the network. When designing both networks, I tried to make each station serve at least 2,000 trips ends to ensure the profitability of the network. In addition, I made extensive use of shape points to ensure that the network made use of Morris County’s existing road and railway network. Even in these dense areas, I found it difficult to do this because of the lack of straight roads within the county. As a result, I made use of a loop structure when building my network because I felt this would best work with the shape of the roads within Morris County. Then, I used interchanges to make is so that passengers could easily transfer from loop to loop. My next step was to calculate the feasibility of this initial network. Below are the calculations done to look at annual profitability, along with the number of trip ends served by each station. Note: I determined it was unreasonable to use the percentage of trip ends for the entire county, so I used 60%, which is roughly the same as percent covered for my final network to calculate total trip ends. Additionally, I changed the mode split factor to be linear because of the low coverage within Morris County. Lastly, all analysis done can be found in the attached spreadsheet, MorrisTripAnalysis.xlsx. Miles of Guideway Total Trip ends Peak hour Stations Interchanges Length served Total Trips Trips (#) (#) (miles) (per day) (per day) (per day) 31 9 30.67 270,795 81,239 12,186

Average Vehicle Vehicle Operating Fleet size Average trip Length Occupancy Fare Costs (Trips/vehicle (#) (Miles) ) 1,340 5 2 $3.00 $0.20

Capital Costs Annual Recurring Costs

Stations Guideway Vehicles Total Cost of Capital Maintenance Operating Total (M$) (M$) (M$) (M$) (M$) (M$) (M$) (M$) $62 $153 $134 $349 $28 $7 $12 $47

Annual Revenue P&L

Station lease and naming Fare rights Total (M$) (M$) $73 $1 $74 $27

From these calculations, one can see that the initial network is predicted to make $27 million a year. Therefore, one can reasonably conclude that expanding the network to the entire county is economically feasible as well. When looking at the plot of trip ends served per station, I saw that I managed to have most stations serve at least 5,000 trip ends. Only 7 of my stations fell below that benchmark. From the analysis of the initial network, I concluded that I needed to ensure that the remaining stations built continued to serve trip ends at a high level. In a somewhat rural county, such as Morris County, this will mean the percent covered is not nearly as high, but it should allow the final network to continue to make a profit.

Final Network Following the construction of my initial network, I set out to expand and cover the remainder of Morris County. This network is shown above. It is important to understand that my final network could not possibly cover all of the trip ends in Morris County. As one can see from the picture below, Morris County has many large rural residential areas in which residents may find a PRT network to be too intrusive. Therefore, I decided to avoid many areas like this believing that not only would the network be intrusive but also it might not be financially viable because of the amount of guideway needed to connect these rural stations. In the end, my final network had 334 stations, 218 interchanges, and 413.96 miles of guideway. Throughout the entire network, I continued to use a basic loop structure, and then used interchanges to link the successive loops together. I made extensive use of shape points so that my network could follow the pre-established road and railway network in Morris County. This final network covers 2,113,517 out of 3,402,873 trip ends, which is a 62.11% coverage ratio. I decided that this final coverage percentage would be ideal; adding additional stations increased the guideway amount while adding too few trip ends.

Below I have included pictures that show the different types of areas within Morris County that my network covers. First, I have included a picture of the network in the Mount Olive area, a rural residential area in the southwest corner of Morris County. As one can see, an extremely large amount of guideway is needed to connect the stations, and in certain areas two-way guideway is needed. Areas like this, though, were generally avoided when building my final network. Next, I will show a picture from Netcong, which is on the western border of Morris County. I included this picture because I felt that it gave an accurate representation of a typical area within Morris County. It is not especially dense, but had enough trip ends to justify multiple stations, which loop together through the use of various interchanges. Additionally, I also felt this picture showed the need for an extremely high number of shape points if one wanted to follow the pre-established road network. Next, I will show pictures that represent the extremely dense areas of Morris County. First, I included a picture of Dover and its surrounding area to show the growth from the initial network. More stations were added to satisfy the amount of trip ends in the area, and a number of interchanges were added so that all of the loops could become interconnected. Highly dense areas such as Dover make it potentially possible to have a profitable PRT network for Morris County. Lastly, I will include another section of the network in a highly dense area, Parsippany. As the network moved into the highly dense areas, I tried to add as many loops as I could in order to lessen trip lengths. This meant the addition of a number of interchanges to connect all of the resulting loops. My final network had a 1.53 station to interchange ratio, which I feel is fairly low for a county that has as many rural areas as Morris County. Additionally, superposition of station coverage started to occur in these areas, but because of the population density this is hard to prevent.

After completing this network, I next plotted the number of trip ends per station, which is shown below.

I was pleased with this outcome of this plot. Only 46 out of 334 or 13.77% of stations serve less than 2,000 trip ends a day and only 15 out of 334 sort or 4.5% of stations serve less than 1,000 trip ends a day. I felt that my network did a good job avoiding unprofitable stations, as the presence of a small number of unprofitable stations can easily be subsidized by the presence of so many profitable stations. Next, one might notice that my top three stations serve 45,675, 31,971, and 29,258 trip ends respectively and question how that is possible in Morris County. Thus, I went back to each station and examined its location to see if any error occurred. My station with the highest number of trip ends serves Atlantic Health Systems, the second largest employer in Morris County, a large census placemark, as well as countless of small business placemarks. I enclosed a picture of this situation below. The station with the second highest number of trip ends serves two census placemarks of size 10,152 and 17,384, which accounts for the number of trip ends served. Lastly, the station with the third highest number of trip ends serves a census placemark of size 26,660. Therefore, although this stations serve a relatively high number of trip ends, I feel comfortable with the numbers. My next step in analyzing my final network was to look at its annual profit and loss, using the Excel sheet provided. The results are shown below:

Miles of Total Trip Guideway ends Peak hour Stations Interchanges Length served Toal Trips Trips (#) (#) (miles) (per day) (per day) (per day) 334 218 413.96 2,113,517 656,350 98,453

Average Average Vehicle Fleet trip Vehicle Operating size Length Occupancy Fare Costs (#) (Miles) (Trips/vehicle) 10830 5 2 $3.00 $0.20 Capital Costs Annual Recurring Costs

Stations Guideway Vehicles Total Cost of Capital Maintenance Operating Total (M$) (M$) (M$) (M$) (M$) (M$) (M$) (M$) $48 $668 $2,070 $1,083 $3,821 $306 $76 $98 1

Annual Revenue P&L

Station lease and naming Fare rights Total (M$) (M$) $591 $12 $603 $122

As one can see, this analysis predicts my final network for Morris County will make $122 million a year. This shows that despite a low coverage percentage a network can still be profitable. I feel that by ensuring that nearly all stations served at least 2,000 trips and not using excess guideway I was able to keep my network profitable. My next step in the analysis was to find the break-even fare for Morris County. This produced the following plot, which shows that the break-even fare for Morris County is roughly $2.40.

Improvements and Conclusion

From the analysis done above, one can tell that it is possible to build a profitable network within Morris County. Improvements can be made to the analysis, though, to give a more accurate picture. First, the underlying data set needs to be improved. Most importantly, better data on businesses needs to be inputted. Not all businesses in Morris County are included, some employee numbers are inaccurate, and the patron number is not well established. Unfortunately, it seems as though this problem will be difficult to solve. Second, more analysis can be done with regards to building the Morris County PRT progressively. The mix between rural and highly dense areas in Morris County makes this analysis even more pertinent. For example, building the most profitable stations earlier will allow the subsidization of stations that serve fewer trip ends. This type of analysis could allow the next Morris County PRT builder to better understand the optimal coverage percentage for Morris County. I stopped my network at 62% coverage because I felt as though adding more stations would not maintain profitability; looking back, I wish I had a better way to determine this value. Finally, further work can be done to connect a network in Morris County to the rest of New Jersey. Research shows that 42% of Morris County residents leave the county everyday for work. If the Morris County PRT could serve these trips ends, then it could become even more profitable and perhaps subsidize even more rural stations.

In conclusion, the network I built for Morris County does a good job of showing the potential for PRT. This network covered 62% of trip ends within Morris County, while trying to adhere to the already established road and railway network. In addition, by charging $3.00 a fare, the system is projected to make $109 million a year. In a county as wealthy as Morris County, increasing the fare might not decrease ridership much at all so more profit could potentially be made. As a long-term project, it definitely seems feasible to begin building the network in the most profitable areas in early years while slowly adding the less profitable stations. This could result in the added benefit of increasing the total coverage percentage for Morris County.