Throughout the world, the reliability of public transport systems is constantly under review. Questions of reliability are particularly applicable to bus services, as they commonly share road space with other vehicles.
This study used graphical and statistical approaches to assess the reliability of services in Adelaide across a typical month. Using smartcard boarding data in conjunction with the published timetables, bus reliability measures were developed. To check the validity of using this boarding data, comparisons were drawn to the results previously obtained using Automatic vehicle location along a handful of individual routes.
The analysis suggests that passenger’s boarding and alighting, as well as traffic congestion, are key contributors to on-time performance of buses at the stop level. However, it was found that boarding where a ticket sale was involved did not contribute much to travel time variability although it slows down vehicles considerably.
A paper presented to the 15th International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management, 2017, Adelaide.
cupum 2017 published paper (411695 PDF)