Calculation of Benefits of Advanced Integrated Rail Service: Application of Intelligent Transportation Systems to the Developing City of Lima, Peru

This paper calculates the benefits of the Advanced Integrated Rail Service in Lima, Peru. The service consists of the application of five new intelligent transportation systems to rail transit managed from an advanced marketing and information center. These systems provide (a) advanced passenger information, (b) optimized productivity of roads that access rail stations and their capacities, (c) improved rail transfers, (d) advanced taxi–rail service, and (e) advanced parking management. The new service can produce benefits by improving the quality of rail travel, increasing the productivity of taxis, and optimizing the productivity of roads that access rail stations and their capacities. The benefits include the reduction of three cost items: (a) transport user costs (time, monetary, and vehicle operating costs), (b) the cost required to operate the system (fuel subsidies to stabilize the effect of the variability in oil prices), and (c) the cost of externalities (health impacts, the cost of accidents, social costs, and the cost from carbon emissions). The benefits are estimated by the use of transportation planning software with data from the urban transportation master plan for the period from 2005 to 2025. As a result, the new rail service can produce considerable benefits. These are derived from the transfer of passengers from automobiles and taxis to rail for a segment of their trip, but it can also produce negative but smaller effects derived from the shift of traffic from faster highways to the slower roads that access rail stations. The advanced integrated rail service can foster rail ridership, increase average speeds in the city, and reduce fuel subsidies