Mobility insights through consumer data: a case study of concessionary bus travel in the West Midlands

Current transport facilities are often built around efficiency and meeting the needs of the commuting population. These can therefore struggle to provide services suited to some of the most vulnerable members of society. In order to achieve an inclusive transport system, it is vital that transport authorities have access to detailed insights into the mobility needs and demands of different groups of the population. Increasingly, these transport authorities are making use of smart technologies and the resulting data to gain greater insight into transport users, and in turn inform decision making and policy planning. These smart technologies include automated fare collection (AFC) systems, which produce large volumes of detailed transport and mobility data from smart card transactions. To a lesser extent, retail datasets, such as loyalty card transaction data, have also been utilised. The spatiotemporal components of these data can provide valuable insight into the activity patterns of cardholders that may not be captured in traditional transport data. This thesis presents an exploration of these two forms of consumer data, with a focus on the older population in the West Midlands. Firstly, this thesis demonstrates how smart card data can be processed and analysed to provide detailed insights into the mobility patterns of concessionary bus users and how these relate to long-term changes in bus patronage recorded in the study area. Secondly, the extent to which loyalty card transaction data can be employed to understand retail behaviours and activity patterns is explored, with a focus on how these insights can be used to supplement and enhance the understanding of mobility gained from the smart card data. Finally, these insights are discussed in terms of the capacity of the current transport network to meet the mobility needs of the older population and the potential of consumer data for future transport-related research

Determinants of public transport use in Perth, Western Australia

This study examines the primary determinants explaining spatial and temporal variations in public transportation use in Perth using 2009 SmartRider data. The developed robust predictive model includes land use, urban form, socio-economic characteristics and public transport availability. Land-use development integrated with sustainable transportation systems, more frequent and densely distributed feeder bus service to train stations, density of low-income resident and university student populations are highlighted as important for policy making encouraging increased public transport use

IDENTIFYING A CUSTOMER CENTERED APPROACH FOR URBAN PLANNING: DEFINING A FRAMEWORK AND EVALUATING POTENTIAL IN A LIVABILITY CONTEXT

In transportation planning, public engagement is an essential requirement forinformed decision-making. This is especially true for assessing abstract concepts such aslivability, where it is challenging to define objective measures and to obtain input that canbe used to gauge performance of communities. This dissertation focuses on advancing adata-driven decision-making approach for the transportation planning domain in thecontext of livability. First, a conceptual model for a customer-centric framework fortransportation planning is designed integrating insight from multiple disciplines (chapter1), then a data-mining approach to extracting features important for defining customersatisfaction in a livability context is described (chapter 2), and finally an appraisal of thepotential of social media review mining for enhancing understanding of livability measuresand increasing engagement in the planning process is undertaken (chapter 3). The resultsof this work also include a sentiment analysis and visualization package for interpreting anautomated user-defined translation of qualitative measures of livability. The packageevaluates users satisfaction of neighborhoods through social media and enhances thetraditional approaches to defining livability planning measures. This approach has thepotential to capitalize on residents interests in social media outlets and to increase publicengagement in the planning process by encouraging users to participate in onlineneighborhood satisfaction reporting. The results inform future work for deploying acomprehensive approach to planning that draws the marketing structure of transportationnetwork products with residential nodes as the center of the structure

Passengers’ choices in multimodal public transport systems : A study of revealed behaviour and measurement methods

The concept of individual choice is a fundamental aspect when explaining and anticipating behavioural interactions with, and responses to, static and dynamic travel conditions in public transport (PT) systems. However, the empirical rounding of existing models used for forecasting travel demand, which itself is a result of a multitude of individual choices, is often insufficient in terms of detail and accuracy. This thesis explores three aspects, or themes, of PT trips – waiting times, general door-to-door path preferences, with a special emphasis on access and egress trip legs, and service reliability – in order to increase knowledge about how PT passengers interact with PT systems. Using detailed spatiotemporal empirical data from a dedicated survey app and PT fare card transactions, possible cross-sectional relationships between travel conditions and waiting times are analysed, where degrees of mental effort are gauged by an information acquisition proxy. Preferences for complete door-todoorpaths are examined by estimation of full path choice models. Finally, longitudinal effects of changing service reliability are analysed using a biennial panel data approach. The constituent studies conclude that there are otherexplanatory factors than headway that explain waiting times on first boarding stops of PT trips and that possession of knowledge of exact departure times reduces mean waiting times. However, this information factor is not evidentin full path choice, where time and effort-related preferences dominate with a consistent individual preference factor. Finally, a statistically significant on-average adaption to changing service reliability is individual-specific andnon-symmetrical depending on the direction of reliability change, where a relatively large portion of the affected individuals do not appear to respond to small-scale perturbations of reliability while others do, all other thingsbeing equal

Spatial analysis, modelling and measures of transit accessibility: a technical advancement

Accessibility refers to the ease of reaching destinations. Although methodology for measuring accessibility has advanced significantly in the last few decades, the issue of increasing urban sprawl has been largely unexplored in existing accessibility models. In recent years, increasingly dispersed activities in many large cities around the world have changed mobility needs. In cities where both population and employment are growing in suburban areas, concentrations of employment and commercial activities outside the Central Business District (CBD) have emerged which has created diversity in people’s travel patterns. In this context, the role of the public transport system becomes increasingly complex, and the size of areas that need to be served by public transport exponentially increases. Transit agencies face challenges in meeting the increasingly diverse travel needs. Public transport is not efficient if it cannot provide convenient access to essential activities such as jobs, shopping and education in suburban areas. In growing cities, transit systems must be modified to serve new mobility requirements and provide a high proportion of trips to connect peripheral areas. Therefore, transit accessibility models must address urban sprawl, the change of urban form from monocentric to polycentric, and the effect on people’s travel patterns and demand. Existing transit accessibility models quantify the level of accessibility based on the number of accessible activities. The spatial distribution of accessible activities is an important indicator of the spatial performance of transit networks and should be considered in accessibility measurement. The thesis develops a new methodology to calculate the transit accessibility considering the spatial distribution of accessible activities and transit service connectivity from each origin transit stop. This study also extends the scope of accessibility measures from active to passive accessibility which is used to evaluate the node component of the node–place model to increase the usefulness of the model as a transit oriented development (TOD) planning tool to assess areas for potential TOD. Brisbane, Australia is chosen as the case study. The accessibility measure developed in this study has great practical advantage in transit and land use planning. The measure can assist transit planners and decision-makers to identify areas with low accessibility and maximise land use and transport integration