PRT: Ocean County
ORF 467 Final Network Report
Caroline Logue (partner: Julio Fredes)
1/11/2011
Introduction
Ocean County, located fifty miles east of Philadelphia, seventy miles south of New York, and twenty miles north of Atlantic City, holds a 2007 census estimated population of 558,531 people with a density of 803 people per square mile. Toms River is the county seat and, both the township and the county as a whole are one of the fastest growing areas in New Jersey since the 1990s. Ocean County is the second largest county by area (916 square miles) in New Jersey and is comprised of 30.53% water. Monmouth County borders the north, Atlantic County the south, and Burlington County the west. The county is a particular hotspot during the summer months due to its extensive eastern border of the Atlantic Ocean.
The county, consisting of 33 municipalities, boasts several well-known beaches including Seaside Heights, Long Beach Island, Point Pleasant Beach, and Surf City. You’re almost guaranteed to endure heavy congestion on Route 37 crossing the Barnegat Bay to the Barnegat Peninsula when the weather’s hot. The area is so popular that MTV’s great reality hit “Jersey Shore” films most of its episodes in Seaside Heights. Public transportation is not very well developed and the local roads become so clogged, that traffic may seem unbearable at times.
The largest Six Flags theme park, Six Flags Great Adventure, is located in the northwestern part of the county along with Six Flags Wild Safari and Six Flags Hurricane Harbor. Although a large portion of the county is the hub of summer activity, the county also serves as the northeastern gateway into the Pine Barrens and is home to several state parks, including Barnegat Lighthouse, Island Beach, Double Trouble, and Jackson State Forest, among others. With an influx of people in the summer months going to the shore or Six Flags, it is difficult to say whether a PRT would be profitable year-round. Certainly the more rural western part of the county might not be suitable to a PRT system, at least in the early stages of development.
2009 ORF 467 PRT Proposal
2008 ORF 467 PRT Proposal
2007 ORF 467 PRT Proposal
2004 ORF 467 PRT Proposal
More Information on Ocean County
NJ DOT Rideshare
Placemark Data
To determine whether a PRT system would be advisable in Ocean County, we first needed to input the coordinates of all major locations in the county. Fortunately, past years had already compiled a substantial amount of data with latitude and longitude coordinates and had provided estimates of people, patrons per day, enrollment, etc. Before adding additional locations, I scrutinized the existing data and adjusted figures that I felt were exaggerated. I noticed that several of the companies listed would more likely be making house calls than working on site at the company headquarters, and so I drastically decreased the number of employees listed as working at several locations. To compensate for this decrease, I assumed that 1% of the entire population of Ocean County (represented in type 1 housing data) was in receipt of some service call each day – whether it be a cleaning staff, a UPS delivery, an internet service provider, etc. This 1% increase was represented in the type 1 data under “Patrons per Day”; I used the “floor” function in Excel to ensure that my calculations would all yield integers.
After critical examination of all figures, I used Google Earth to find additional placemarks that may not have been considered. Google Earth presented all data points in degrees, minutes, and seconds, so I converted this measure into decimal points to be consistent with the already-existing CSV file. I included several supermarkets, Wawas, Wal-Marts, and commercial banks, and in total I added over 30 placemarks.
Initial Networks
The first network I developed is along Route 37 beginning at the cloverleaf interchange with the Garden State Parkway. Starting at the Garden State Parkway allows cars to park and take the PRT to the beach just after leaving the parkway. Route 37 runs along the border of Toms River, the county seat, and Island Heights and crosses the Barnegat Bay to the Barnegat Peninsula where summer hotspots like Seaside Heights are located. Due to vacationers and rapid growth in commercial development, Route 37 is often congested especially in the summer. Although there is a bus along the road to the shore, the vast amount of congestion makes a PRT network seem like a much more viable solution.
I faced two challenges building my first network. The peninsula is quite isolated from the main land with only one bridge on the southern end and the land is so narrow that a “string-of-pearls” network is really the only option lest we lose money placing incoming stations too close to outgoing stations. The only option I deemed possible was creating two-way guideway for both the bridge crossing and the majority of the peninsula. Although the shore is a craze during the summer, we would want to be cautious before developing in this area that we wouldn’t lose vast amounts of money for the remaining three quarters of the year.
The second network I developed is in Toms River with Route 37 running through it. I found this township to be particularly dense especially with the Ocean County Mall and the largest suburban school district in the state. This network, situated on the mainland, was far easier to develop and I connected a series of cycles with interchanges to allow for maximum mobility. Inserting the interchanges, I paid particular attention to travel time, so that people would not be going outing of their way on any given trip. With the exception of the narrow bridge, in the bottom left corner of the image, connecting some residential areas to the main attractions, there is no two-way guideway in this network.
Because there are about six million visits to Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, NJ each year, I wanted my third network to serve Six Flags. Unfortunately other than the three Six Flags sites and Jackson Outlets, the northwestern portion of the county is quite rural. The network is not nearly as intricate as the one I created for Toms River; however, I still attempted to maintain the cyclic design from before. The area also appears to be swampy so I had to use additional guideway to ensure the PRT would not run through these swamp zones. The rural area required a lot more guideway than I expected.
Preliminary financial analysis of these three networks is included in the appendix.
Final Network
View of Northeast
View of Northwest
View of South
In the final network I connected a series of cycles using interchanges wherever possible. The networks were rather intricate all along the eastern portion of the county; however, the center and western areas were quite a bit more spread out. Because Six Flags is located in the rural western area though, I still found it necessary to provide outlets to these less frequented rural areas. As a result, there are often several miles of guideway in central Ocean County with fewer stations.
Network Statistics
The tool indicated that stations serving less than 1,000 trips were not profitable, and so I attempted to serve at least 1,000 as much as possible. Often the rural areas did not reach this many trips, which explains why some portions of the aerial view seem spottier. I completed the network with 702 stations and 287 interchanges, totaling 753.45 miles of guideway. This corresponds to 1,240,621 trips per day and we assumed the average trip length to be 5 miles. I reached 83.54% service in Ocean County, which is shy of the 90% goal primarily because of the less dense western region. The chart below summarizes these network statistics.
The trip ends served by day according to ascending station ID number are shown below.
Reordering the graph by descending number of trips, it is easy to see that the bulk of stations, about 650, make less than 10,000 trips per day and that there are only 16 stations that have trips served in excess of 20,000 trips. The maximum number of trips made is 42,356 trips while the lowest number of trips, which happens to be especially low, is 392 trips.
Network Financials
From the network statistics chart above, we assumed the average vehicle occupancy was 2 and the fare was $3/ride. We also defined the peak period as carrying 15% of the total trips per day and from this we calculated the fleet size as (peak hour trips/10)*1.1. Recall that it costs $2 million to build each station and $5 million for every mile of guideway. Vehicle costs are assumed to be 0.10 times the total fleet size while maintenance costs are 2% of the total cost. A few other assumptions on costs, also defined in the chart below, suggest that were we to implement the entire network in one year we would reap a profit of $234 million.
Analyzing further, we see that the break-even fare is about $2.45, which is incredibly low. And given the size of the county, 916 square miles, it’s likely people will be traveling several miles to get to a number of their destinations. Thus, a fare of even $3.50 could be reasonable, and would reap profits even greater than expected.
Dijkstra’s Algorithm (section written together with Julio)
We implemented Dijkstra’s algorithm in MATLAB to measure how efficient our networks are. To do this, we used the “matrices.html” link provided by John and Nathan and followed the simple instructions to obtain the distances traveled. In the gravity method we implemented in the My City assignment we assumed that distances between two zones were just 1.2 times the Cartesian distance of their centroids. We see now, after applying Dijkstra’s algorithm to our network, that in our last assignment we made a gross simplification. Although each of our counties are 916 square miles (Ocean County) and 665 square miles (Monmouth County), the top ten distances between two stations running along network guideway can reach as much as 108.42 miles for Ocean County and 69.71 miles for Monmouth.
Starting Station / Ending Station / Distance Traveled657 / 612 / 108.42
655 / 612 / 108.41
114 / 612 / 108.29
108 / 612 / 108.03
658 / 612 / 107.91
536 / 612 / 107.75
115 / 612 / 107.73
656 / 612 / 107.46
660 / 612 / 107.19
657 / 614 / 107.17
655 / 614 / 107.16
659 / 612 / 107.14
114 / 614 / 107.04
108 / 614 / 106.78
537 / 612 / 106.66
658 / 614 / 106.66
657 / 613 / 106.66
655 / 613 / 106.65
534 / 612 / 106.63
114 / 613 / 106.53
**See appendix for MATLAB code.
Looking closely at the above chart it appears that the same cluster of ending stations cause difficulty and if I had more time I would add more interchanges in the area so that this subsection would be more properly linked to the overall network.
These figures highlight the trade off we made when creating our networks. In an effort to conserve money, we purposely avoided constructing stations and, consequently, guideway that would produce fewer than 1,000 trips per day; this cost consciousness caused us to serve fewer than 90% of trips as per the initial goal. Our conservative approach to laying stations inevitably produced networks that were less efficient.
What we deem most advisable would be to begin construction on the conservative end that we have upheld in our final network design, and hold off on investigating technical inefficiencies until the network has proven itself sustainable and profitable in the long run.
Appendix of MATLAB code for Dijkstra’s Algorithm
A = csvread('oceanadjmat.csv');
C = csvread('oceanguidewaydist.csv');
LoS = csvread('ocean-los.csv');
[cost,path] = dijkstra(A,C);
for i = 1:length(cost)
for j = 1:length(cost)
if cost(i,j) == Inf
cost(i,j) = 0;
end
end
end
maximums = zeros(3,10);
for i = 1:20
[r_val r_ind] = max(cost,[],1);
[col_val col_ind] = max(r_val);
maximums(1,i) = r_ind(col_ind);
maximums(2,i) = col_ind;
maximums(3,i) = cost(r_ind(col_ind),col_ind);
cost(r_ind(col_ind),col_ind) = 0;
end
Appendix of Preliminary Financials
*(not comparable to ultimate financial analysis)
Network 1. From Garden State Parkway Cloverleaf Interchange along Route 37 to Barnegat Peninsula
Figures assuming 144,915 Trips per day
Cost of One-way Guideway / $-Cost of Two-way Guideway / $147,120,000.00
Cost of Stations / $46,000,000.00
Total Building Cost / $193,120,000.00
Upper Bound Total Building Cost / $212,432,000.00
Annual Maintenance / $4,248,640.00
Average Trip Length / $18.39
Annual Operating Cost / $97,272,020.03
Annual Interest Cost / $12,745,920.00
Total Annual Cost / $114,266,580.03
Annual Fares Revenue / $158,681,925.00
Annual Rent / $828,000.00
Total Annual Revenue / $159,509,925.00
Anticipated Annual Revenues/ Anticipated Annual Costs / 1.40
Total Revenue after 30 years / $4,785,297,750.00
Total Cost after 30 years / $3,640,429,400.75
Revenue less Cost after 30 years / $1,144,868,349.25
Number of Trips / 144915
Number of Miles of One-way Guideway / 0
Number of Miles of Two-way Guideway / 24.52
Number of Stations / 23
Average % of Guideway Ridden / 0.75
Cost per mile of One-way Guideway / 5000000
Cost per mile of Two-way Guideway / 6000000
Cost of Station / 2000000
Operating Cost per Mile / 0.2
% Maintenance Cost on Capital / 0.02
Threshold Upper Bound Capital Cost / 1.1
Average Number of Riders in Vehicle / 2
Average Fare Paid / 3
Rent Paid Per Month Per Station / 3000
Interest Rate on Bond / 0.06
To justify building the project we would need to be making at least 54,860 trips per day, which is considerably lower than the estimated number of trips. But, we must keep in mind that we don’t currently have information on productions and attractions, so the actual trips in the network are likely quite a bit lower than 144,915. In addition, this network caters specifically to the summer season, since a majority of the stations are on the peninsula, along the beach. In the winter season, we would anticipate a drastic drop in trip demand to this area.