Using non-real-time Automatic Vehicle Location data to improve bus services

Although real-time Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) data is being utilised successfully in the UK, little notice has been given to the benefits of historical (non-real-time) AVL data. This paper illustrates how historical AVL data can be used to identify segments of a bus route which would benefit most from bus priority measures and to improve scheduling by highlighting locations at which the greatest deviation from schedule occurs. A new methodology which uses historical AVL data and on-bus passenger counts to calculate the passenger arrival rate at stops along a bus route has been used to estimate annual patronage and the speed of buses as they move between stops. Estimating the patronage at stops using AVL data is more cost-effective than conventional methods (such as surveys at stops which require much more manpower) but retains the benefits of accuracy and stop-specific estimates of annual patronage. The passenger arrival rate can then be used to calculate how long buses spend at stops. If the time buses spend at stops is removed from the total time it takes the bus to traverse a link, the remaining amount of time can be assumed to be the time the bus spends moving and hence the moving speed of the bus can be obtained. It was found that estimation of patronage and the speed of buses as they move between stops using AVL data produced results which were comparable with those obtained by other methods. However the main point to note is that this new method of estimating patronage has the potential to provide a larger and superior data set than is otherwise available, at very low cost.     

基于港口枢纽处TOD公交站点选址模型的设计

本文针对中小型沿海城市提出的成本模型嵌入到公交站点优化方案中,构建各项成本的表达式,整合并建立以成本最小为目标的公交站点选址模型,对TOD公交站点的选址进行合理规划。此模型可有效运用到在中小型沿海城市中港口枢纽处的公交站点合理设置中,即实现乘客从轮渡到公交的零换乘,又能使港口枢纽对港口枢纽出入口与城市道路交汇处的交通现状影响达到最小,公交的通行能力达到最高。     

Rethinking bus punctuality by integrating Automatic Vehicle Location data and passenger patterns

This paper investigates punctuality at bus stops. Although it is typically evaluated from the point of view of bus operators, it must also account for users, as required in recent service quality norms. Therefore, evaluating punctuality at bus stops is highly important, but may also be a complex task, because data on both bus arrivals (or departures) and users must be taken into account and processed. Data on buses can be collected by Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) systems, but several challenges must be addressed in order to use them effectively. Passengers data at bus stops cannot be derived from AVL, but they can be used to derive passenger patterns and need to be integrated into processed AVL data. This paper proposes a new punctuality measure defined as the fraction of passengers who will be served within an acceptably short interval after they arrive. A method is proposed to determine this measure: it provides (i) several rules to handle AVL collected data, (ii) a procedure integrating processed AVL data and potential passengers’ patterns and (iii) a hierarchical process to perform the punctuality measure on each bus route direction of a transit network, as well as for every bus stop and time period. The paper illustrates the experimentation of this method on more than 4,000,000 data of a real bus operator and represents outcomes by easy-to-read control dashboards.     

Alternative bus scheduling policies for an exclusive bus lane

This paper presents the development and evaluation of alternative dispatching and route policies for an exclusive bus lane. The current operating system is described in terms of passenger demand, bus lines using the lane and layout features of the lane. The major operational problem of bus convoying is discussed within the context of “bunching” phenomenon. Assumptions, variables and constraints associated with the simulation model developed to experiment with alternative dispatching and route policies are introduced. Four dispatching and three route policies are tested during experimentation. Dispatching policies are defined with respect to dispatching frequencies for each line using the exclusive lane. Route policies are presented in terms of the bus stops served, the emphasis being put on the ring and express services. Four performance measures are defined in order to evaluate and compare the alternative policies developed, namely: (i) the difference between the percent increase in the number of total passengers boarded and the percent increase in the number of buses operating, (ii) average number of passengers boarded at a unit bus stop, (iii) average time spent by a bus stop and (iv) average bus capacity utilization rate. Comparisons of alternative operating policies based on these performance measures are presented in graphical and tabular format. A statistical evaluation of the findings is also given within the framework of analysis of variance where each performance measure is considered to be the response variable, and the controllable variables are taken to be the (i) dispatching frequency, (ii) route, (iii) passenger demand distribution and (iv) the number of replications. The major findings indicate the importance of the “route” factor for this study, whereas the performances of alternative operating policies are shown to be insensitive to the dispersion parameter of passenger demand.     

上海市城市机动车停车场(库)环保设计优化研究

对上海市7家建筑、环评设计院的15位工程师开展问卷调研,运用Cronbach’sα系数量化了问卷的信度,并根据调研结果,随机实测4座停车场16辆车的洗车污水,进行对标分析与Kruskal-Walli test,最终对城市机动车停车场(库)提出了设计优化建议。结果表明:问卷的Cronbach’sα系数为0.639,信度较好。未经过处理的停车场洗车污水样本存在超标现象,COD的超标区间为[4.23%,108.32%],TP的超标率为10.00%,BOD₅的超标区间为[22.40%,139.40%]。COD、BOD₅、SS的检测结果受车型大小的影响,呈正相关关系。建议从洗车设施、绿荫绿化等方面优化城市停车场(库)的环保设计。     

Analysis of intended bus usage

In order to plan bus operations, it is necessary for transit planners to understand what factors may influence travelers’ choice of buses for travels within a city. The proposed method involves various scenarios of a hypothetical bus operation which was rated by a group of individuals.

Analysis of Covariance technique is employed to analyze people's sensitivities to their perceived levels of bus service characteristics. The technique involves:

1. testing for the significant effects of varying levels of service characteristics upon people's intentions to use bus service, and

2. assessing differences among various population segments in their sensitivity patterns towards bus service characteristics.

Results from the application of the technique to attitudinal data collected by the Orange County Transit District indicate that bus service characteristics do influence, independently and jointly, respondents’ stated intentions to use buses.

Sensitivity pattern differed across the five homogeneous segments identified in an earlier research based on socioeconomic characteristics.

One segment (an older, predominatly male population segment with higher home ownership level and lower income than the rest of the sample) was relatively insensitive to changes in bus fare and was influenced by changes in headway independent of changes in access distance. Another segment consisting of fewer registered voters with lower education also exhibited similar independent impact of headway and access distance.

The technique is especially useful in reducing a large number of proposed alternative bus systems to a smaller set for further planning considerations by specifying the ranges within which variation of service characteristic would cause substantial changes in the intended usage responses.     

International comparisons of bus licensing

Based upon a doctoral research programme which surveyed bus and coach licensing systems throughout the world, this article seeks to arrive at a taxonomy of licensing. It identifies the familiar principles of quality, quantity and price control, examines them against the British licensing system introduced in 1930, and concludes that quantity control forms a more or less permeable barrier to contestability in the market for public road passenger transport; where it is strong, it is a constraint upon the sustainability of the market. It defines the British and the many similar licensing systems as arbitrational, and contrasts this characteristic with systems which are overtly based upon the allocation of a franchise.

The central section of the paper analyses various systems in more detail, and warns against too great a dependence upon the letter of the law. Much depends upon the ways in which regulations can be interpreted, and cases exist where practice contradicts the statute. There is found to be a division between arbitrational and franchise systems that is broadly the same as the division between countries with a Common Law background, and those with a Romano‐Germanic polity. Franchise is however common in the control of urban transport in countries where the extra‐urban system is arbitrational.

Franchise systems are further defined as being either concessions, or subcontracts. The significance of the franchising authority is examined. The final section sets out the issues of principle that appear to follow from this analysis, and stresses the importance of the distinction between arbitration and franchise for the understanding of licensing and control.     

The effects of non-contingent free bus tickets and personal commitment on urban bus ridership

To compare the effects of free rides and commitment to a performance goal on increasing bus ridership in an urban setting, 83 non-bus riding automobile drivers were exposed to one of the following conditions. (1) Control where route and schedule information were provided. (2) Commitment, where subjects agreed to ride the bus twice a week during the treatment period. (3) Free Tickets, where an unlimited supply of free bus tickets were provided. (4) Free Tickets Plus Commitment, where the free transit and commitment conditions were combined. While there were no systematic differences between the experimental conditions, each of them produced significantly higher levels of ridership than the no-treatment control group during the 4 week treatment period and two subsequent follow-up periods. These results suggest that both free rides and agreement to a specific performance goal can overcome many of the obstacles which prevent individuals from initiating and maintaining regular patterns of bus ridership.     

Evaluating bus transit performance of Chinese cities: Developing an overall bus comfort model

In order to improve the level of bus service, a field study was undertaken to develop a combined bus comfort model. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the different ways to predict the bus comfort, in addition to the variable experimental techniques used. It was found some environment parameters like noise, vibration, thermal comfort and the acceleration would affect the passengers’ experience. In this model, both the measurement of objective physical parameters and subjective questionnaire survey were conducted to gather the practical environment date, as well as to distribute questionnaires on board city buses during the same trips. By comparing the subjective views of bus passengers to objective physical parameters, a combined bus comfort model was established. This model helps to calculate the concrete value of passengers’ perceived bus comfort. An effective approach integrated the comfort model, measuring instrument and the driver monitor could greatly improve the bus service quality.     

打折的公共汽车票--闲话"外宾"

改革开放初期的时候,我和几个年纪稍长的朋友在一起聊天.那哥儿几个下海特早,按当时的标准看,已经可以被称作大款了.不知道是谁先抻的茬儿,说起砍价这件事儿来了.其中有个朋友年纪最大,见多识广,嘴上俏皮话也多.他为砍价这个话题作了一个精辟的总结,"如今这年月,除了公共汽车票不能砍价,剩下的全都能砍价儿."     

Future use of stage bus services

The reasons underlying the decline of stage bus services in the U.K. over the past 30 years seem to be well understood, and the probable future trends have been projected using a quantitative forecasting model. The model considers U.K. bus services at a very aggregate level, but it breaks the demand into specific user groups: work trips, children's travel, travel by the elderly, and all other travel, and separately for households with and without a private car. Forecasts depend very sensitively on the level of economic growth assumed, since this governs the two major factors which determine public transport use — car ownership and the cost of operating the services. If the economy could recover its historic growth rates, a further substantial decline in bus use seems inevitable under most realistic assumptions. However, with the present economic outlook, a lower growth rate seems likely to persist for some time, and in this case public transport use will become much more stable in the 1990's; a tendency which would be helped if there were large increases in fuel prices. Many of the Metropolitan Counties have adopted policies of strongly restraining future rises in fares, in some cases to the extent of freezing fares in monetary terms. The effects of such policies on both patronage and subsidies are considered here, and although much of the current political attention is focussed on controlling fares, the question of balance between fares and service levels is also discussed. Lastly, it must be admitted that these predictions are based on knowledge which is largely restricted to the short-term effects of transport policies. The nature of our uncertainty about longer-term effects, and the possible size of them, is considered in terms of sensitivity-testing of the prediction model.     

上海公交再舞资产整合魔杖

上海久事把所持27.88%的巴士股份(600741)股份无偿划转上汽集团后,接着无偿受让强生集团20%的股份,进而成为强生控股(600662)实际控制人.     

Methods for creating bus timetables

This paper provides alternative methods for constructing bus timetables using passenger load data. It attempts to fulfill six major objectives: to evaluate alternative timetables in terms of required resources; to improve the correspondence of bus departure times with passenger demand; to provide alternative timetables for the schedulers' use in specific scheduling situations; to permit direct bus frequency changes for possible exceptions (known to the schedulers) which do not rely on passenger demand data; to allow the construction of timetables with headway smoothing techniques (similar to that performed manually); and to integrate different headway setting and different timetable construction methods. The procedures developed set the bus departure times for the case of evenly spaced headways and for the case of allowing the headways to be unevenly spaced. In the first case, smoothing techniques are developed in the transition segments between adjacent time periods. In the second case, the departure times are shifted so as to obtain uniform average loads instead of even headways. The final product of the research consists of a set of computer programs which are tested on a heavy bus line in Los Angeles.     

Models of bus boarding and alighting dynamics

Understanding the dynamics of boarding/alighting activities and its impact on bus dwell times is crucial to improving bus service levels. However, research is limited as conventional data collection methods are both time and labour intensive. In this paper, we present the first use of smart card data to study passenger boarding/alighting behaviour and its impact on bus dwell time. Given the nature of these data, we focus on passenger activity time and do not account for the time necessary to open and close doors. We study single decker, double decker and articulated buses and identify the specific effects of floor/entrance type, number of activities and occupancy on both boarding and alighting dynamics. A linear relationship between average boarding and alighting times and their respective standard deviations is also found, whereas the variability of boarding and alighting time decreases with the number of passengers boarding and alighting. After observing the cumulative boarding/alighting processes under different occupancy conditions, we propose a new model to estimate passenger activity time, by introducing critical occupancy – a parameter incorporating the friction between boarding/alighting and on-board passengers. We conduct regression analyses with the proposed and another popular model for simultaneous boarding/alighting processes, finding that the critical occupancy plays a significant role in determining the regime of boarding and alighting processes and the overall activity time. Our results provide potential implications for practice and policy, such as identifying optimal vehicle type for a particular route and modelling transit service reliability.     

Investigating the irregularity of bus routes: highlighting how underlying assumptions of bus models impact the regularity results

A bus route is inherently unstable: when the system is uncontrolled, buses fail to maintain their time‐headways and tend to bunch. Several mathematical bus motion models were proposed to reproduce the bus behavior and assess management strategies. However, no work has established how the choice of a model impacts the irregularity of modeled bus systems, that is, the non‐respect of scheduled headways. Because of this gap, a large body of existing works assumes that the ability of these models to reproduce instability comes only from stochasticity, although the link between stochastic inputs and the level of irregularity remains unknown. Moreover, some recognized phenomena such as a change of travel conditions during a day or delays at signalized intersections are ignored. To address these shortcomings, this paper provides an overview of existing dynamic bus‐focused models and proposes a simple way to classify them. Commonly used deterministic and stochastic models are compared, which allows quantifying the relative influence of stochasticity of each model component on outputs. Moreover, we show that a change in the system equilibrium in a full deterministic system can lead to irregularity. Finally, this paper proposes a refinement of travel time models to account for non‐dynamic signals. In presence of traffic signals, we show that a bus system can be self‐regulated. Especially, these insights could help to calibrate bus model inputs to better reproduce real data. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ridership drivers of bus rapid transit systems

We have collected information on 46 bus rapid transit (BRT) systems throughout the world to investigate the potential patronage drivers. From a large number of candidate explanatory variables (quantitative and qualitative), 11 sources of systematic variation are identified which have a statistically significant impact on daily passenger-trip numbers. These sources are fare, headway, the length of the BRT network, the number of corridors, average distance between stations; whether there is: an integrated network of routes and corridors, modal integration at BRT stations, pre-board fare collection and fare verification, quality control oversight from an independent agency, at-level boarding and alighting, as well as the location of BRT. The findings of this paper offer important insights into features of BRT systems that are positive contributors to growing patronage and hence should be taken into account in designing and planning BRT systems.     

Modeling and measurements of bus service reliability

A new concept for predicting the performance reliability of a bus service is developed and evaluated. Reliability of bus service is defined as the amount of consistency associated with an operational performance measure from day to day. The variability of travel time performance is posited as the best indicator of reliability. Travel time is found to be an accurate and easily collectible performance measure, and data are collected for several steady periods. These are defined as periods in which performance measure characteristics remain relatively unchanged. A beta distribution with predicted parameters r and T is fitted for the bus travel time data, both for peak and off-peak situations. Based on this distribution, a strategy for predicting perfomance reliability is suggested.     

湖北黄冈公交车罢运调查

11月3日,持续3天的"黄州全城无公交"终于结束--110辆公交车恢复运营. "一个承担40万市民营运任务的公共交通,居然停运3天,这简直难以想像,它暴露了公共交通市场化后带来的问题,这是一个活生生的教训."11月2日,湖北省建设厅城市建设处一名负责人如此评价.     

Multiple period optimization of bus transit systems

Analytic models are developed for optimizing bus services with time dependence and elasticity in their demand characteristics. Some supply parameters, i.e. vehicle operating costs and speeds are also allowed to vary over time. The multiple period models presented here allow some of the optimized system characteristics (e.g. route structure) to be fized at values representing the best compromise over different time periods, while other characteristics (e.g. service headways) may be optimized within each period. In a numerical example the demand is assumed to fluctuate over a daily cycle (e.g. peak, offpeak and night), although the same models can also be used for other cyclical or noncyclical demand variations over any number of periods. Models are formulated and compared for four types of conditions, which include steady fixed demand, cyclical fixed demand, steady equilibrium demand and cyclical equilibrium demand. When fixed demand is assumed, the optimization objective is minimum total system cost, including operator cost and user cost, while operator profit and social welfare are the objective functions maximized for equilibrium demand. The major results consist of closed form solutions for the route spacings, headways, fares and costs for optimized feeder bus services under various demand conditions. A comparison of the optimization results for the four cases is also presented. When demand and bus operating characteristics are allowed to vary over time, the optimal functions are quite similar to those for steady demand and supply conditions. The optimality of a constant ratio between the headway and route spacing, which is found at all demand densities if demand is steady, is also maintained with a multi-period adjustment factor in cyclical demand cases, either exactly or with a relatively negligible approximation. These models may be used to analyze and optimize fairly complex feeder or radial bus systems whose demand and supply characteristics may vary arbitrarily over time.