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99 percent of all public transportation systems
in the world are subsidizes by the government.
A lot of money is invested in this field,
and the environmental benefits are known to all.
In some cases the investment
succeeds to draw more passengers
and in some cases not.
Let's find out why.
Let's imagine a bus company allocating the same
number of buses to 2 bus lines.
One bus line serves an initial high number of passengers,
while the other serves an initial low number of passengers.
How will the buses in this bus line look like?
Crowded.
The high demand makes the line profitable for the bus company
and it adds more buses to adjust the supply.
Where would the bus company take the buses from?
Exactly!
The bus line with the initial low number of passengers.
These empty buses cause losses to the bus company
so they are re-allocated to the profitable line.
In the laboratory of Geo-Simulations and Spatial analysis
geography and environmental students are working to model
phenomena like this.
By designing spatial agent based models
we can characterize the behaviour of each person in the model
to reveal the true nature of the phenomena.
I want to show you the benefits of such a model.
We said before a bus line can enter a positive or a negative loop.
The only parameter which determines its evolution
is the initial number of passengers.
This leads us to conclude that there must be a
critical mass point
which differs the two evoultions.
Above it, the system goes up.
Below it, the system goes down.
An agent-based model I designed under the supervision
of Prof. Itzhak Bennenson and Dr. Karl Martens
can calculate this critical mass point
Let's see why it is so important.
I hope you understood how modelling the dynamics
between passengers and public transportation
can help us enlarge the number of bus passengers
instead of them using polluted cars�