Development of Estimating Methodology for Transit Accessibility Using Smart Card Data

Author(s):  
Hyunsoo Yun ◽  
Eun Hak Lee ◽  
Dong-Kyu Kim ◽  
Shin-Hyung Cho

Transit accessibility is an explanatory variable evaluating the mobility of a region in consideration of the connectivity and demand among the regions, which has been used for an important index to determine transport policy on the transit network. This study aims to develop an accessibility index considering the two factors with a demand-weighted approach, that is, impedance and attraction level. Two variables, travel time and the ratio of trips, are employed to calculate the accessibility index, and comparative assessments between zones are conducted. The application of smart card data makes it possible to analyze travel information and reflect them empirically in the model. This study identifies zones with vulnerable accessibility and suggests criteria for transit investment plans with two aspects, that is, intensive transit area and spatial distribution of the accessibility index. These aspects contribute to transit planners by suggesting transit investment criteria and comprehensible statistics to evaluate accessibility. Since zones with low accessibility indexes are identified as being vulnerable to access from other zones, policymakers should focus on those zones to improve the overall transit network.

Author(s):  
Eun Hak Lee ◽  
Kyoungtae Kim ◽  
Seung-Young Kho ◽  
Dong-Kyu Kim ◽  
Shin-Hyung Cho

As the share of public transport increases, the express strategy of the urban railway is regarded as one of the solutions that allow the public transportation system to operate efficiently. It is crucial to express the urban railway’s express strategy to balance a passenger load between the two types of trains, that is, local and express trains. This research aims to estimate passengers’ preference between local and express trains based on a machine learning technique. Extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) is trained to model express train preference using smart card and train log data. The passengers are categorized into four types according to their preference for the local and express trains. The smart card data and train log data of Metro Line 9 in Seoul are combined to generate the individual trip chain alternatives for each passenger. With the dataset, the train preference is estimated by XGBoost, and Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) is used to interpret and analyze the importance of individual features. The overall F1 score of the model is estimated to be 0.982. The results of feature analysis show that the total travel time of the local train feature is found to substantially affect the probability of express train preference with a 1.871 SHAP value. As a result, the probability of the express train preference increases with longer total travel time, shorter in-vehicle time, shorter waiting time, and few transfers on the passenger’s route. The model shows notable performance in accuracy and provided an understanding of the estimation results.


Author(s):  
Amr M. Wahaballa ◽  
Fumitaka Kurauchi ◽  
Toshiyuki Yamamoto ◽  
Jan-Dirk Schmöcker

The estimation of platform waiting time has so far received little attention. This research aimed to estimate platform waiting time distributions on the London Underground, considering travel time variability by using smart card data that were supplemented by performance reports. The on-train and ticket gate to platform walking times were assumed to be normally distributed and were matched with the trip time recorded by the smart cards to estimate the platform waiting time distribution. The stochastic frontier model was used, and its parameters were estimated by the maximum likelihood method. The cost frontier function was used to represent the relation between the travel time recorded in the smart card data as an output and the on-train time and walking time between the ticket gate and the platform as inputs. All estimated parameters were statistically significant, as shown by p-values. Comparing the travel time values estimated by the proposed model with the times recorded recorded in the smart card data shows a goodness-of-fit coefficient of determination of more than 95%. The estimation proved to have quick convergence and was computationally efficient. The results could facilitate improvements in transit service reliability analysis and passenger flow assignment. Matching the obtained distributions with the observed smart card data will help with estimating route choice behavior that can validate current transit assignment models.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (16) ◽  
pp. 4418
Author(s):  
Jason Chia ◽  
Jinwoo (Brian) Lee ◽  
Hoon Han

This study explores the relationship between the spatial distribution of relative transfer location (i.e., the location of the transfer point in relation to the trip origin and destination points) and the attractiveness of the transit service using smart card data. Transfer is an essential component of the transit trip that allows people to reach more destinations, but it is also the main factor that deters the smartness of the public transit. The literature quantifies the inconvenience of transfer in terms of extra travel time or cost incurred during transfer. Unlike this conventional approach, the new “transfer location” variable is formulated by mapping the spatial distribution of relative transfer locations on a homogeneous geocoordinate system. The clustering of transfer points is then quantified using grid-based hierarchical clustering. The transfer location factor is formulated as a new explanatory variable for mode choice modelling. This new variable is found to be statistically significant, and no correlation is observed with other explanatory variables, including transit travel time. These results imply that smart transit users may perceive the travel direction (to transfer) as important, in addition to the travel time factor, which would influence their mode choice. Travellers may disfavour even adjacent transfer locations depending on their relative location. The findings of this study will contribute to improving the understanding of transit user behaviour and impact of the smartness of transfer, assist smart transport planning and designing of new transit routes and services to enhance the transfer performance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong Zhang ◽  
Jianlong Wang ◽  
Chenrong Cui ◽  
Yicong Li ◽  
Wei He ◽  
...  

Understanding human movement patterns is of fundamental importance in transportation planning and management. We propose to examine complex public transit travel patterns over a large-scale transit network, which is challenging since it involves thousands of transit passengers and massive data from heterogeneous sources. Additionally, efficient representation and visualization of discovered travel patterns is difficult given a large number of transit trips. To address these challenges, this study leverages advanced machine learning methods to identify time-varying mobility patterns based on smart card data and other urban data. The proposed approach delivers a comprehensive solution to pre-process, analyze, and visualize complex public transit travel patterns. This approach first fuses smart card data with other urban data to reconstruct original transit trips. We use two machine learning methods, including a clustering algorithm to extract transit corridors to represent primary mobility connections between different regions and a graph-embedding algorithm to discover hierarchical mobility community structures. We also devise compact and effective multi-scale visualization forms to represent the discovered travel behavior dynamics. An interactive web-based mapping prototype is developed to integrate advanced machine learning methods with specific visualizations to characterize transit travel behavior patterns and to enable visual exploration of transit mobility patterns at different scales and resolutions over space and time. The proposed approach is evaluated using multi-source big transit data (e.g., smart card data, transit network data, and bus trajectory data) collected in Shenzhen City, China. Evaluation of our prototype demonstrates that the proposed visual analytics approach offers a scalable and effective solution for discovering meaningful travel patterns across large metropolitan areas.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 728
Author(s):  
Zhicheng Shi ◽  
Xintao Liu ◽  
Jianhui Lai ◽  
Chengzhuo Tong ◽  
Anshu Zhang ◽  
...  

In this era of population aging, it is essential to understand the spatial distribution patterns of the elderly. Based on the smart card data of the elderly, this study aims to detect the home location and examine the spatial distribution patterns of the elderly cardholders in Beijing. A framework is proposed that includes three methods. First, a rule-based approach is proposed to identify the home location of the elderly cardholders based on individual travel pattern. The result has strong correlation with the real elderly population. Second, the clustering method is adopted to group bus stops based on the elderly travel flow. The center points of clusters are utilized to construct a Voronoi diagram. Third, a quasi-gravity model is proposed to reveal the elderly mobility between regions, using the public facilities index. The model measures the elderly travel number between regions, according to public facilities index on the basis of the total number of point of interest (POI) data. Beijing is used as an example to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methods, and the methods can be widely used for urban planning, design and management regarding the aging population.


Author(s):  
Takashi Nicholas Maeda ◽  
Junichiro Mori ◽  
Masanao Ochi ◽  
Tetsuo Sakimoto ◽  
Ichiro Sakata

This study attempts to investigate a method for creating an index from mobility data that not only correlates with the number of people who relocate to a place but also has causal influence on the number of such individuals. By creating an index based on human mobility data, it becomes possible to predict the influence of urban development on future residential movements. In this paper, we propose a method called the travel cost method for multiple places (TCM4MP) by extending the conventional travel cost method (TCM). We assume that the opportunity cost of travel time on non-working days reflects the convenience and amenities of a neighborhood. However, conventional TCM does not assume that the opportunity cost of travel time varies according to the departure place. In this paper, TCM4MP is proposed to estimate the opportunity cost of travel time with respect to the departure place. We consider such estimation to be possible due to the use of massive mobility data. We assume that the opportunity cost of travel time on non-working days reflects the convenience and amenities of the neighborhood. Therefore, we consider that the opportunity cost of travel time has a causal influence on future residential mobility. In this paper, the validity of the proposed method is tested using the smart card data of public transportation in Western Japan. Our proposed method is beneficial for urban planners in estimating the effects of urban development and detecting the shrinkage and growth of a population.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peitong Zhang ◽  
Zhanbo Sun ◽  
Xiaobo Liu

Skip-stop operation is a low cost approach to improving the efficiency of metro operation and passenger travel experience. This paper proposes a novel method to optimize the skip-stop scheme for bidirectional metro lines so that the average passenger travel time can be minimized. Different from the conventional “A/B” scheme, the proposed Flexible Skip-Stop Scheme (FSSS) can better accommodate spatially and temporally varied passenger demand. A genetic algorithm (GA) based approach is then developed to efficiently search for the optimal solution. A case study is conducted based on a real world bidirectional metro line in Shenzhen, China, using the time-dependent passenger demand extracted from smart card data. It is found that the optimized skip-stop operation is able to reduce the average passenger travel time and transit agencies may benefit from this scheme due to energy and operational cost savings. Analyses are made to evaluate the effects of that fact that certain number of passengers fail to board the right train (due to skip operation). Results show that FSSS always outperforms the all-stop scheme even when most passengers of the skipped OD pairs are confused and cannot get on the right train.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiao Fu ◽  
Yu Gu

Over the past few decades, massive volumes of smart card data from metro systems have been used to investigate passengers’ mobility patterns and assess the performance of metro network. With the rapid development of urban rail transit in densely populated areas, new metro lines are constantly designed and operated in recent years. The appearance of new metro lines may significantly affect passenger flow and travel time in the metro network. In this study, smart card data of metro system from Nanjing, China, are used to study the changes of metro passenger flow and travel time due to the operation of a new metro line (i.e., Line 4, opened on 18 January 2017). The impact of the new metro line on passenger flow distribution and travel time in the metro network is first analysed. As commuting is one of the major purposes of metro trips, the impact of the new metro line on commuters’ trips is then explicitly investigated. The results show that the new metro line influences passenger flow, travel time, and travel time reliability in the metro network and has different impacts on different categories of commuters.


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