01333015

Component

A healthy and efficient public transit system is indispensable to reduce congestion, emissions, energy consumption, and car dependency in urban areas. However, some bus routes chronically underperform. Uncertain travel times and passenger demand preclude schedule adherence and headway uniformity. In a stochastic environment, deviations from schedules are unavoidable leading to an overall decrease on level of service and capacity. This study focuses on TriMet’s Route 15 which experiences difficulties in terms of schedule adherence and headway regularity. TriMet is the transit provider in the Portland metropolitan region. TriMet’s Bus Dispatch System (BDS) has been collecting and archiving automated vehicle locator (AVL) and automatic passenger counter (APC) data since 1997; the availability of this rich AVL/APC archived data allows for substantial performance measurement methods, particularly data visualization techniques for route-level operations performance monitoring. Based on the analysis of a half-year’s worth of TriMet BDS data for Route 15, this paper offers two frameworks for visualizing bus route operations performance measures: (1) A static visualization performance measure framework based on color-coded time-space diagrams, which allows data analysis down to an hourly level and for different segments, aggregate over time or space, or provide single stop analysis; and (2) A dynamic interactive bus monitoring visualization framework based on Google Maps API, which demonstrates bus operations performance along a route for any chosen bus. This research provides novel ways to summarize and visualize vast amounts of transit data in an insightful and intuitive manner. Visualizations proposed in this study will aid transit agency managers and operators to identify operational problems, better understand how such problems propagate spatially and temporally across routes.

01329018

11-2218

English

18p

2011

Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures; Maps; References (13) ; Tables (1)

Automatic vehicle location; Bus transit; Level of service; Passenger counting; Performance measurement; Schedules and scheduling; Traffic data; Uncertainty; Urban areas; Visualization

Google Maps

Service reliability

Portland (Oregon)

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

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2011 Paper #11-2218

TRIS, TRB

Feb 17 2011 6:06PM