How Crowded is Crowded? A Practitioner’s Tool to Assessing Rail Congestion

Passenger crowding on rail transit systems impacts passenger experience and ridership growth and often reflects the lack of infrastructure capacity to meet travel demand. Operators and policy makers recognize the importance of crowding issues and develop policies and measures to monitor and assess the levels of crowding. Despite the importance of monitoring crowding, most systems rely on the traditional approach of data collection – manually collecting and monitoring passenger crowding conditions. The advancement of transit technology for assessing crowding is still in the developmental and testing stages, and is not ready for systemwide deployment on a recurring basis. This paper explores an application created to estimate passenger crowding through measuring passenger loads on a link level – between any pair of stations in any direction of travel. The paper discusses the approach of automating passenger load estimates with readily available faregate transaction data, documents the methodology and development of the application, proposes different uses of the application in the rail transit operating and planning environments, and identifies potential improvements. In the case of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA/Metro), the documented application not only assists in Metro’s operations planning and long range planning, but also sets a practical example on how to take advantage of its fare transaction data and turn it into a powerful tool to track variations of passenger loads on the lines and within stations for any given time period.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP015 Transit Capacity and Quality of Service.
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    500 Fifth Street, NW
    Washington, DC  United States  20001
  • Authors:
    • Jia, Wendy
    • Chow, Melissa
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2015

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 14p
  • Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01551848
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 15-0789
  • Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Jan 27 2015 11:24AM