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GROWING DEMANDS FOR PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IN URBAN AREAS, SATISFYING CUSTOMER NEEDS AND EFFICIENT USE OF SCARCE RESOURCES REQUIRE THE ADOPTION OF EFFECTIVE PLANNING AND OPERATION METHODS AND THE IMPROVEMENT OF SERVICE PLANS THROUGH PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS. THIS FEATURE PRESENTS AN ALTERNATIVE WAY OF USING FARE DATA TO EXTRACT RIDERSHIP AND OPERATIONS INFORMATION TO BETTER MANAGE AND OPERATE TRANSIT SYSTEMS.
INTRODUCTION
Satisfying the growing need for urban public transportation is one of the major challenges facing transit agencies, and the efficient use of existing facilities and resources gains special importance in this respect. Agencies also must try to match demand patterns and satisfy customer needs in providing transportation services.
To realize these goals, agencies need to adopt efficient and effective planning and operation mediods: monitoring and adjusting transit operations in accordance with the service plan in real time and evaluating and improving the service plan through performance analysis in an off-line fashion.
All of these tasks require an extensive set of information. For example, the operational/service planning process, comprising four basic components (designing a route network with stops, terminals and interchanges; setting timetables; scheduling vehicles to trips; and assigning drivers), requires certain inputs to produce desired outputs.1 Among the required inputs are passenger demands by time of day and day of week and travel times (service and deadheading), which are dynamic in nature. The former are extracted from ridership (passenger) counts and the latter from operations information.
With regard to performance analysis, transit agencies collect various performance measures for evaluating and improving the service plan (using ridership and operations information). These measures are represented by variables, which are mainly service-related inputs, outputs and consumption through cost-efficiency, cost-effectiveness and service effectiveness.2
Among performance measures are cost per passenger; passenger per vehicle-hour; system-level schedule adherence (punctuality or on-time performance); ridership; and frequency.3,4 Depending on the uses, transit agencies also collect information at the system, route, route segment, trip and stop level using various technologies.5,6,7 Various transit agencies were surveyed on the ridership and operations information they collect.8
Using various advanced technologies, transit agencies are able to collect more data today than in the past. Automatic vehicle location (AVL) systems usually provide real-time displays of Vehicle location, often including computer-aided dispatching (CAD) tools. Many existing AVL systems are not...