Understanding the Trade off Between Schedule Changes, Cost, and Timeliness in a Major Transit System

Metro King County (KC) is about to undertake a change in the use of their scheduling tools, in an effort to reduce costs by removing elasticity/recovery time from the schedule. The schedule is one of the principle inputs to the delivery of service, and so, ideally, according to TCRP report 88, there would be a variety of metrics of performance that could be used to evaluate the overall effect of the schedule change on the transit service delivered to King County. In the work proposed here, the timeliness measures will be a focus. There is to date no local quantitative results published to understand the cost-benefits of the tradeoffs between reduced elasticity and on-time performance. Metro KC’s automatic vehicle location (AVL) system provides detailed tracking of each of the vehicles, both in-service and between routes. Almost uniquely, for an agency Metro's size, this detailed performance information can be made available to the University of Washington (UW) in real time, at no extra cost to Metro. For at least 10 years this principal investigator (PI) has operated and maintained the Mybus infrastructure that obtains, stores and compares the real-time vehicle performance data about the entire fleet against the scheduled service. The work proposed here would initially establish a baseline set of timeliness performance metrics. As the schedule is modified, using several methodologies and algorithms applied to different routes, these metrics will be estimated using the actual on the ground vehicle performance. Since one of the goals of reducing schedule elasticity is to reduce cost, there exists the opportunity to understand the quantitative relationship between scheduling algorithms/methodologies, costs and timeliness. This is a unique opportunity to experiment with a large operating transit system, and identify quantitative outcomes from a variety of scheduling decisions over the course of four schedule changes, with 26,000 individual trips per day, using 1,200 operating vehicles over the course of a year.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This report was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, University Transportation Centers Program.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Northwest Regional Center X (TransNow)

  University of Washington, More Hall, P.O. Box 352700
  Seattle, WA  United States  98195-2700

  Federal Highway Administration

  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590

  Research and Innovative Technology Administration

  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Authors:
  • Dailey, Daniel J
• Publication Date: 2011-4

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Edition: Final Report
• Features: Appendices; Figures; Illustrations; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 28p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Alternatives analysis; Automatic vehicle location; Operating costs; Performance measurement; Public transit; Real time information; Schedules and scheduling
• Identifier Terms: King County Metro Transit
• Uncontrolled Terms: Timeliness
• Geographic Terms: King County (Washington)
• Subject Areas: Finance; Operations and Traffic Management; Public Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01447870
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: TNW2012-10, Research Project Agreement No. 62-0948
• Contract Numbers: DTRT07-G-0010
• Files: UTC, TRIS, ATRI, USDOT
• Created Date: Oct 1 2012 10:38AM