Abstract

In the last few years, our cities become more and more crowded due to the increasing number of cars and old city planes. Small cities as Messina (i.e. an Italian city with 200k inhabitants) have travel time comparable with bigger ones as Adelaide or Cologne (i.e. cities with more than 800k inhabitants situated in Australia and Italy, respectively). A possible solution to mitigate such an issue is to use simulation software and design different city plans to find the most suitable one. However, these tools are often difficult to be used by city traffic managers without good computer skills. In this paper, we used a Multi-Agent Transport Simulation (MATSim) to provide a simple tool that can be used to better organize the direction of roads and public transportation. In particular, starting from the open data provided by the city of Messina, we implemented a software code able to process a MATSim event file through matsim-tools. Moreover, we proposed an index to estimate how much roads are safe for cyclists. From the simulation results, we were able to discover the most saturated links and the travel time distribution by hour of departure time.