Synthesizing AFC, APC, GPS and GIS Data to Generate Performance and Travel Demand Indicators for Public Transit

Public transport service planning has, for a long time, been undermined by a limited amount of relevant data and travel demand knowledge. The implementation of emerging technologies such as AFC (Automatic Fare Collection) by contactless smart cards, APC (Automatic Passenger Counting), GPS (Global Positioning System) and geographic information system (GIS)-based operational databases are increasingly common. Very often, when taken separately, data from these systems only provide partial truth or worse, misleading information. At the same time, the transit industry is left with data archived at an exponential rate as cheaper equipments become more accessible. Given that context, this research attempts to achieve convergence of the four tools in order to provide coherent, consistent and complete ridership information. Based on archived databases from a large-sized transit operator in North America, the paper examines the proper characteristics of each instrument and explores empirical strategies for conducting practical data analyses which may benefit from the synthesizing multiple information technologies. A modeling framework is proposed. The calculation of performance and travel demand indicators is demonstrated and illustrated with various visualization techniques. At the same time, the analyses reveal that efforts are needed to tackle data inconsistencies in huge databases and to produce algorithms capable of correcting, imputing, enriching archived passive data in order to develop data-based transit demand modeling methods.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Chapleau, Robert
  • Chu, Ka Kee Alfred
  • Allard, Bruno
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2011-1-23 to 2011-1-27
• Date: 2011

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: DVD
• Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17p
• Monograph Title: TRB 90th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Automatic fare collection; Data collection; Geographic information systems; Global Positioning System; Passenger counting; Public transit; Smart cards; Travel demand
• Uncontrolled Terms: Automated passenger counters
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01332952
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 11-2894
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Mar 21 2011 2:13PM