EVALUATION OF THE PUBLIC BUS TRANSIT PERFORMANCE BASED ON SMART CARD DATA

2024-2-20
Kazemi Afshar, Ali Asghar
Modern cities require reliable public bus transit (PBT) systems to enhance travel convenience, job growth, and living standards. The Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual (TCQSM) Report 100, a reference document for evaluation of PBT, includes network and route characteristics analyzed under two major dimensions of i) availability and ii) comfort and convenience, which have further metrics proposed based on the planning or operational characteristics. For the evaluation of comfort and convenience aspects, new technologies, such as smart card data (SCD), offer new opportunities to draw insights regarding passenger usage patterns and efficiency, which is also the main objective of this study. In this regard, SCD mainly supports estimating the metrics transit auto travel time (TAT), passenger per capacity (PPC), and on-time departures (OTD), which are challenging if estimated by manual data collection. Preparation of SCD also requires data preprocessing in of i) evaluation of data quality and availability, ii) detection of boarding stop locations, iii) matching of PBT route and SCD layers via linear referencing techniques in the GIS environment. For the city of Konya, planning data revealed high Hour-of-Services (HS) levels while low service frequency (SF) values in general. The SCD of the first week of October 2018 is later used to evaluate the quality of service (QOS) for a total of 9 PBT lines with different ridership levels (high, moderate, and low): Regardless of the ridership level, the PBT lines mostly had delays on departures leading to an acceptable OTD (levels of C and D); a similar quality was observed for TAT levels. PPC, however, showed different behavior, which showed low levels of quality on high ridership lines, while it was acceptable for moderate ridership levels. The high PPC levels in the low ridership lines were due to the underutilized PBT capacity of these lines, which are mainly designed to create accessibişity to remote neighborhoods. The evaluation of the selected PBT lines showed the applicability of the SCD for QOS evaluations, which should be performed for each PBT line for metropolitan regions.
Citation Formats
A. A. Kazemi Afshar, “EVALUATION OF THE PUBLIC BUS TRANSIT PERFORMANCE BASED ON SMART CARD DATA,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2024.