Evaluation of a multimodal urban arterial: The passenger macroscopic fundamental diagram

•Extension of the concept of macroscopic fundamental diagram to account for the number of passengers.•Importance to model multimodal flows as movement of people and not only vehicles.•Unified relationship to compare efficiency of transit management strategies.•Assessment of impacts of mode choice on the performance of multimodal networks.

This paper aims to extend the concept of macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) to combine different transportation modes. Especially, we propose a unified relationship that accounts for cars and buses because the classical MFD is not sufficient to capture the traffic flow interactions of a multimodal traffic. The concept of passenger macroscopic fundamental diagram (p-MFD) is introduced. With this new relationship, the efficiency of the global transport system, i.e. behaviors of cars and buses, can be assessed. Intuitively, the p-MFD shape strongly depends on the mode ratio. Thus, user equilibrium and system optimum are studied and compared. Finally, this relationship is used to design bus system characteristics and to identify the optimal domains of applications for different transit strategies.