Analyzing Passenger Incidence Behavior in Heterogeneous Transit Services Using Smartcard Data and Schedule-Based Assignment

Passenger incidence (station arrival) behavior has been studied primarily to understand how changes to a transit service will affect passenger waiting times. The impact of one intervention (e.g., increasing frequency) could be overestimated when compared with another (e.g., improving reliability), depending on the assumption of incidence behavior. Understanding passenger incidence allows management decisions to be based on realistic behavioral assumptions. Earlier studies on passenger incidence chose their data samples from stations with a single service pattern such that the linking of passengers to services was straightforward. This choice of data samples simplifies the analysis but heavily limits the stations that can be studied. In any moderately complex network, many stations may have more than one service pattern. This limitation prevents the method from being systematically applied to the whole network and constrains its use in practice. This paper considers incidence behavior in stations with heterogeneous services and proposes a method for estimating incidence headway and waiting time by integrating disaggregate smartcard data with published timetables using schedule-based assignment. This method is applied to stations in the entire London Overground to demonstrate its practicality; incidence behavior varies across the network and across times of day and reflects headways and reliability. Incidence is much less timetable-dependent on the North London Line than on the other lines because of shorter headways and poorer reliability. Where incidence is timetable-dependent, passengers reduce their mean scheduled waiting time by more than 3 min compared with random incidence

Automatic data for applied railway management : passenger demand, service quality measurement, and tactical planning on the London Overground Network

Thesis (S.M. in Transportation)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2010.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-209).The broad goal of this thesis is to demonstrate the potential positive impacts of applying automatic data to the management and tactical planning of a modern urban railway. Tactical planning is taken here to mean the set of transport-specific analysis and decisions required to manage and improve a railway with time horizons measured in weeks, months, or up to a year and little or no capital investment requirements. This thesis develops and tests methods to (i) estimate on-train loads from automatic measurements of train payload weight, (ii) estimate origin-destination matrices by combining multiple types of automatic data, (iii) study passenger incidence (station arrival) behavior relative to the published timetable, (iv) characterize service quality in terms of the difference between automatically measured passenger journey times and journey times implied by the published timetable. It does so using (i) disaggregate journey records from an entry- and exit-controlled automatic fare collection system, (ii) payload weight measurements from "loadweigh" sensors in train suspension systems, and (iii) aggregate passenger volumes from electronic station gatelines. The methods developed to analyze passenger incidence behavior and service quality using these data sources include new methodologies that facilitate such analysis under a wide variety of service conditions and passenger behaviors. The above methods and data are used to characterize passenger demand and service quality on the rapidly growing, largely circumferential London Overground network in London, England. A case study documents how a tactical planning intervention on the Overground network was influenced by the application of these methods, and evaluates the outcomes of this intervention. The proposed analytical methods are judged to be successful in that they estimate the desired quantities with sufficient accuracy and are found to make a positive contribution to the Overground's tactical planning process. It is concluded that relative measures of service quality such as the one developed here can be used in cross-sectional analysis to inform tactical planning activity. However, such measures are of less utility for longitudinal evaluation of tactical planning interventions when the basis against which service quality is judged (in this case the timetable) is changed. Under such circumstances, absolute measures, such as total observed passenger journey times, should be used as well.by Michael S. Frumin.S.M.S.M.in Transportatio

The Physiology of Vasodilatation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68237/2/10.1177_000331976101200602.pd