Multiobjective Transit‐Oriented Multimodal Network Design Incorporating Parking Fees

Journal of Advanced Transportation, vol. 2026

Abstract

High car usage in urban areas leads to congestion, pollution, and other negative externalities. While both “carrot” measures (enhancing more sustainable modes of transport) and “stick” measures (discouraging car use) are recognized as essential for sustainable mobility, their combined optimization remains underexplored. This study introduces the Transit Network Design, Frequency, and Parking Setting Problem (TNDFPSP), a novel multiobjective framework that jointly optimizes transit routes, service frequencies, and parking fees in a bimodal context. The optimization problem targets three objectives: minimizing generalized user costs, car usage, and operator deficit, enabling a systematic analysis of trade‐offs between user, environmental, and operational goals. We propose an evolutionary algorithm tailored to this problem and evaluate candidate solutions using a multimodal traffic assignment model that explicitly captures car–transit interactions, including parking fees and search times. Experiments on Mandl’s benchmark network show that incorporating parking fees alongside frequencies not only improves all objectives but also enables better trade‐off analysis for policy design. As an illustrative estimate based on modal passenger‐kilometers, the resulting solutions are associated with an approximately 3.4% lower CO 2 footprint compared to the baseline TNDP, whereas optimizing transit routes and frequencies alone yields only marginal changes. These findings highlight the potential added value of integrated carrot‐and‐stick strategies for sustainable urban transport planning.

Authors 5

1. Tygo Nijsten corresponding

   Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research · University of Amsterdam

   Affiliation as printed

   Korteweg-De Vries Institute for Mathematics , University of Amsterdam , 1098 XG , Amsterdam , the Netherlands , uva.nl

   Sustainable Urban Mobility and Safety , TNO , 2595 DA , The Hague , the Netherlands , tno.nl

2. Jan-Pieter L. Dorsman

   University of Amsterdam

   Affiliation as printed

   Korteweg-De Vries Institute for Mathematics , University of Amsterdam , 1098 XG , Amsterdam , the Netherlands , uva.nl

3. Michel Mandjes Aachen Mathematical Institute

   Leiden University · University of Amsterdam

   Affiliation as printed

   Korteweg-De Vries Institute for Mathematics , University of Amsterdam , 1098 XG , Amsterdam , the Netherlands , uva.nl

   Mathematical Institute , Leiden University , 2300 RA , Leiden , the Netherlands , leiden.edu

4. Erwin Walraven

   Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research

   Affiliation as printed

   Sustainable Urban Mobility and Safety , TNO , 2595 DA , The Hague , the Netherlands , tno.nl

5. Maaike Snelder

   Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research · Delft University of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Transport & Planning , Delft University of Technology , 2628 CN , Delft , the Netherlands , tudelft.nl

   Sustainable Urban Mobility and Safety , TNO , 2595 DA , The Hague , the Netherlands , tno.nl