01516384

Component

Several factors contribute to short-duration unscheduled absences of bus transit operators (drivers). This article aims to understand these factors at the aggregate level and to anticipate future total absence that will need to be filled for a large-size transit operator. The aggregate level is defined as the total number of regular operator absences per garage, day of week and time period that need to be covered by the extraboards. This study analyzes absenteeism data obtained from OC Transpo, the transit provider of the city of Ottawa, Canada. A multilevel regression model is generated to investigate regular operators’ absence. The short-unscheduled absence is estimated in relation to temporal factors, operators’ personal characteristics, aspects of assigned work, and service delivery characteristics. Furthermore, using the model’s coefficients, sensitivity analyses are conducted to demonstrate the advantages of this technique over traditional ones being adopted by various transit agencies. This study provides transit planners and policy makers with a practical methodology that can be used to support extraboard planning practice and help reduce the incidence of missed trips due to absences while having the appropriate size of extraboard operators.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP010 Transit Management and Performance.

01503729

14-1235

English

21p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

References; Tables

Absenteeism; Bus drivers; Bus transit; Case studies; Regression analysis; Sensitivity analysis

Ottawa (Canada)

Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-1235

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 2:28PM