A method for determining alighting locations of bus passengers

Abstract

Origin and destination (OD) matrices are considered as a key point for the transportation and city planners. With the development of advance transportation technologies installed in the public transit, transportation agencies can make necessary adjustments and implement dynamic measures much easier. Automated Data Collection (ADC) systems installed to the vehicles, which are more efficient and economic than other conventional data collection methods, are especially helpful to store data regarding passengers and their trips. Although the origin of a passenger be deduced much easier, the challenging part is to detect the passengers’ destination properly, especially for the bus passengers due to the lack of data when the passenger exits from the system. The objective of this study is to provide a method for inferring the alighting locations of the bus passengers in order to construct more reliable OD matrices. This method is tested by conducting a case study for a single bus route in Istanbul. The overall results show that by using the proposed algorithm over 65% of all recorded trips’ alighting locations were derived. By excluding instances where boarding information is missing or the same card in repetitively used, the success rate reaches up to 70%. For future studies it is suggested that unique characteristics of the transportation systems must be delved into in order to eliminate misleading outputs of any proposed algorithm.