Bus Passenger Origin-Destination Estimation and Related Analyses Using Automated Data Collection Systems

Abstract

This research explores the application of archived data from Automated Data Collection Systems (ADCS) to transport planning with a focus on bus passenger travel behavior, including Origin-Destination (OD) inference, using London as a case study. It demonstrates the feasibility and ease of applying trip-chaining to infer bus passenger OD from smart card transactions and Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) data and is the first known attempt to validate the results by comparing them with manual passenger survey data. With the inferred OD matrices, the variations of weekday and weekend bus route OD patterns are examined for planning purposes. Moreover, based on the inferred OD matrices and the AVL data, alighting times for bus passengers also can be estimated. Bus journey stages, therefore, can easily be linked. By comparing the interchange time and the connecting bus route’s headway, it provides a way to evaluate bus connections.