Survey data to model time-of-day choice: methodology and findings

Abstract

Information technology has set new standards within public transport system management strategies, and renewed attention has been paid to vehicle level-of-service (LOS) performance measurement techniques in recent years. Specifically, in-vehicle GPS technology provides a good opportunity to collect substantial amounts of useful data for accurate public transport LOS measuring. Handling these rich data can be labour intensive, time consuming and challenging, especially in highly dense networks. Systematic, easy to apply, and inexpensive techniques to process information quickly and display LOS outcomes efficiently are required. The main aim of this paper is to present a procedure to obtain some LOS measures, such as waiting times, travel times and their variability, at any spatial and temporal aggregation level in the case of dense bus networks using freely available map and geographic software. The proposed methodology is highly flexible as it can accommodate either fixed or variable space-time aggregations. It can handle vast amounts of GPS data yielding LOS results relatively quickly. Furthermore, it can be implemented at relatively low cost in terms of software requirements, using freely available software. An illustration of the proposed procedure and its results to obtain LOS measures such as travel times and their variability among bus stops, and waiting times for every bus stop is reported, using the geographic location of bus stops and offline GPS data available (every 30 seconds) for all operating buses in Santiago´s public transport system.