Public Transport Fare and Usage Analysis

Added Jul 2026 3 design docs

A student living eleven kilometres from campus faces a decision every single morning that no economics class ever formalises for her: the bus costs ₹15 but takes fifty minutes and may not come, the metro costs ₹40 and takes twenty-eight, the shared auto costs ₹25 and leaves when it fills, and the app cab costs ₹180 and is unthinkable on a normal day. Multiply that choice by a few million commuters and it becomes the central question of urban transport economics, where fares, waiting time, reliability and household income interact to decide who moves freely through a city and who does not.

The intern turns one city corridor set into a fare and usage study. Published fare charts for bus, metro and shared auto are compiled into a fare-per-kilometre matrix for three chosen corridors, stopwatch observations at stops measure real headways and crowding, and a commuter questionnaire in google-forms gathers 80 responses on mode choice, monthly commuting spend and willingness to switch. Everything is modelled in excel into fare-per-kilometre comparisons, a generalised cost that prices waiting time, and an affordability ratio against stated income bands. The findings become a 12-14 slide decision deck built in powerpoint for a fictional city mobility cell, three one-page corridor factsheets designed in canva, and a fare affordability calculator any commuter can use.

Completing the project takes the intern through transport economics in miniature: unit-cost normalisation, valuing time as money, observational field measurement, survey-based stated preference, and the translation of analysis into four costed recommendations aimed at a real decision maker. Infrastructure consultancies, urban policy institutes and mobility startups interview for exactly this ability to move from a stopwatch and a fare chart to a defensible recommendation.

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