Using GPS Data to Gain Insight into Public Transport Travel Time Variability
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 136, Issue 7
Abstract
Transit service reliability is an important determinant of service quality, which has been mainly studied from the perspective of passengers waiting at stops. Day-to-day variability of travel time also deteriorates service reliability, but is not a well-researched area in the literature partly due to the lack of comprehensive data sets on bus travel times. While this problem is now being addressed through the uptake of global positioning system (GPS)-based tracking systems, methodologies to analyze these data sets are limited. This paper addresses this issue by investigating day-to-day variability in public transport travel time using a GPS data set for a bus route in Melbourne, Australia. It explores the nature and shape of travel time distributions for different departure time windows at different times of the day. Factors causing travel time variability of public transport are also explored using a linear regression analysis. The results show that in narrower departure time windows, travel time distributions are best characterized by normal distributions. For wider departure time windows, peak-hour travel times follow normal distributions, while off-peak travel times follow lognormal distributions. The factors contributing to the variability of travel times are found to be land use, route length, number of traffic signals, number of bus stops, and departure delay relative to the scheduled departure time. Travel time variability is higher in the AM peak and lower in the off-peak. The impact of rainfall on travel time variability is only found significant in the AM peak. While the paper presents new methods for analyzing GPS-based data, there is much scope for expanding knowledge through wider applications to new data sets and using a wider range of explanatory variables.
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Acknowledgments
The writers would like to thank the Ventura Bus Company and the Bureau of Meteorology for help in supplying the data used in this research. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the paper reviewers who have made useful suggestions to improve the quality of the paper. Any omissions or errors in the paper are the responsibility of the writers.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 136 • Issue 7 • July 2010
Pages: 623 - 631
Copyright
© 2010 ASCE.
History
Received: Dec 30, 2008
Accepted: Oct 15, 2009
Published online: Oct 22, 2009
Published in print: Jul 2010
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