Bus Arrival Headway Reliability: A Case Study in Hefei, China
Reliability of transit, as a key measurement in transit operation, is important since it affects the mode choice behavior of both current and prospective riders to a great extent, which imposes direct impacts to transit ridership. Therefore capturing this measurement accurately is a key requirement to successfully evaluate whether the transit system is properly operated. However the traditional method of evaluating reliability based on statistical analysis of bus arrival headway has several shortcomings. Specifically the value of reliability using traditional coefficient of variation (CV) is not between 0 and 1, which makes it difficult to explain, and the value of reliability can decrease with the increase of the transit headway. The traditional method also ignores the fact that buses can arrive at stops as a bunch which means the transit service is not reliable. This means the traditional method cannot represent the real operation condition of transit system. But all these shortcomings can be avoided by using the advanced method presented in this paper. Also this study establishes an evaluation framework to assess the reliability of the transit system from different stratification, including stops, routes and network levels. Then the bus operation data of Hefei City is analyzed as a case study. Comparison is conducted to show the improvement made by using the advanced method. Based on the new evaluation measurements, an example of adding exclusive bus lanes to existing bus route was provided to show how well these advanced methods can be used to assess the transit operation and benefit the decision making process.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP015 Transit Capacity and Quality of Service.
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Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Chen, Qian
- Wang, Xin
- Li, Wenquan
- Deng, Weiping
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2013-1-13 to 2013-1-17
- Date: 2013
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 16p
- Monograph Title: TRB 92nd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Bunching; Bus transit operations; Headways; Schedule maintenance; Transit buses
- Uncontrolled Terms: Bus arrival; Service reliability
- Subject Areas: Operations and Traffic Management; Public Transportation; I73: Traffic Control;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01474171
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 13-0698
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Feb 28 2013 3:18PM