A high quality railway service requires that all parts of the complete journey, from door to door, are well-functioning. This includes any transfers taking place, as well as last mile transportation to and from the railway station. Since the last mile often consists of local public transport, the access to this mode at stops and terminals and how well these are functioning are of great importance. A critical aspect is the capacity of the stop or the terminal in relation to the number of departures, where a higher capacity generally means an increase in size. At the same time it is desirable to limit the use of valuable land and keeping the facility as small as possible. The trade-off between capacity and size needs to be evaluated when designing stops and terminals.
In this study we have developed a discrete event simulation model of a combined bus and tram stop, which is a part of a larger multi-modal station. The objective of the study is to evaluate the modelling approach for the situation at hand. Of special interest are the complexities due to the different driving patterns of buses and trams. The developed model is capable of evaluating design alternatives and is applied in a case study of a stop at Norrköping railway station in southern Sweden. The model was found to realistically capture the various events occurring at such a stop and the case study further showed that the model is a useful tool in design evaluation.