The subway becomes the main transport of the largest city.
With the development of its lines, the share of the subway in the total volume of intracity transportation will increase from 5% to 40%. Its effectiveness is expressed in achieving a temporary compactness of the city, allowing to solve the important social problem of reducing the time spent by the population on intracity travel.
The subway affects the route system of street transport, a significant part of the routes of which become a lift to the stations.
Together with the electric street transport the subway covers 80-90% of the total passenger traffic. This necessitates the creation of a unified integrated system “metro – ride-hailing”. As urban areas expand, the need for this system increases. Permanent monthly tickets for trips by all modes of urban transport become its calling card.
In the formation of a unified transport system an important place belongs to the interchange hubs. In terms of urban planning they are classified as compact concentrated (street stops are located in the immediate vicinity of subway exits), compact dispersed (separated from the subway stations by no more than 200 m), as well as separated in one or different levels (with more than 200 m), which require a continuous conveyor transport to provide the standard time for transfers. The progressive graph-analytical method was suggested to assess the quality of planning solutions of transfer hubs, but it has not yet found a proper reflection in the construction practice.
The interaction between the subway and the transit is not clear-cut, the routes are divided into the longitudinal (in respect to the subway lines) running between the subway stations, the transverse ones providing a pickup (return) of passengers from the adjacent areas and the longitudinal-transverse ones fulfilling both functions mentioned above.
Optimal length of the routes in question is set by graph-analytical method. At the current speed of urban transport it varies from 1 to 2.5 km.
Increasing volume of passenger traffic in the largest cities within the limits of standard time costs can be provided only with precise interaction of all types of passenger transport.
Particular attention must be paid to complex systematic transport-sociological surveys, taking into account the movement and the relationship to the different modes of transport.
The population’s demand for urban transport services depends on the fluctuations of its demand taking into account seasonal (monthly), weekly (daily), hourly and intra-hourly irregularity of passenger traffic flows; changes in the length and direction of the latter and other factors. This puts the work of urban transport in a direct dependence on the demand for travel in time and space, causes the need to comply with the planned irregularity of the rhythm of their work.
Under the disconnected departmental administrative-command method of management of enterprises of urban transport the contradictions of two socio-economic aspects aggravate: a positive result beneficial to the enterprise often turns out to be low in its national economic and social efficiency. So, if to increase the level of return on assets it is rational to expand the volume of passenger traffic by reducing the number of rolling stock on the line, the interval between trains, their filling is increased; the time increases and the comfort of the trip decreases. This leads to “transport” fatigue and, as a consequence, to a decrease in labor productivity of metro workers. This cannot continue in the future.
The city and transport develop simultaneously, and this common process must be managed from a single center, based on the conditions of national economic and social efficiency.
At present transport services are characterized by high production cost of passenger transportation with low fare.
In conditions of planned loss-making work of most transport enterprises it seems appropriate to invest state subsidy in fixed assets and current assets, while the cost of traffic service will be covered by paying passengers. This will allow the latter to pay directly for transportation services, economically affecting the quality of passenger traffic.
Fare revenues will affect the national economic and social efficiency of transport enterprises, and the subsidy will go to their technical maintenance and improvement.