Posts in category English
Data driven optimisation of public transport
Presentation at EMTA meeting at TfL in London:
Feedforward mechanisms in public transport; How data improves service quality and increases efficiency.
Find the presentation HERE
International Workshop on Utilizing Transit Smart Card Data for Service Planning
Collecting fares through “smart cards” is becoming standard in most advanced public transport networks of major cities around the world. Using such cards has advantages for users as well as operators. Whereas for travellers smartcards are mainly increasing convenience, operators value in particular the reduced money handling fees. Smartcards further make it easier to integrate the fare systems of several operators within a city and to split the revenues. The electronic tickets also make it easier to create complex fare systems (time and space differentiated prices) and to give incentives to frequent or irregular travellers.
Less utilised though appear to be the behavioural data collected through smartcard data. The records, even if anonymous, allow for a much better understanding of passengers’ travel behaviour as various literature has begun to demonstrate. This information can be used for better service planning.
First International Workshop on Utilizing Transit Smart Card Data for Service Planning; 2nd – 3rd July, 2014; Gifu, Japan
My contribution to the workshop: Short term public transport modelling using smart card data
Improved public transport by data driven research
New promising Big Data sources are becoming available in the public transport industry. This data provides insights into both passenger flows and vehicle performance and is of great help to optimize public transport services. Traffic models are able to quickly process this data and to present it on a geographical layer. It enables to evaluate ridership and to compare it with the use of other modes as car and bike traffic. Finally, what-if predictions are available to gain insights into the expected level of cost coverage, service and ridership. These steps are of great support to optimize the public transport network and timetable design as well as its operations. This presentation reveals such opportunities for public transport systems.
Read more:Presentation seminar “Analytics and Scheduling in Public Transport”
How lightrail may enable enhanced service reliability
The introduction of lightrail in The Hague enabled a leap in service quality. The key challenge in other projects is how to incorporate these expected effects into decision making. In Utrecht we succeeded to calculate the expected service reliability impacts and incorporated them into the cost benefit analysis.
Read more: Presentation Danske Bane Konference
Quality improvement by implementing light rail: case RandstadRail
After the introduction of RandstadRail in The Hague, the level of service reliability increased substantially. An integrated package of planning and control instruments was designed and applied to achieve that objective.
Read: UITP Magazine p 1-2 and UITP Magazine p 3
Big data supports light rail business case
Transport planners are starting to consider how “big data” retrieved from passenger smart cards, computers and mobile phones could improve the design of urban rail networks and timetables, and improve operations by predicting ridership. Niels van Oort, assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, and consultant at Goudappel Coffeng, explains how big data was utilised to support the business case for a proposed light rail line in Utrecht.
Read the full article: Internation Railway Journal (URL) or Internation Railway Journal (PDF)
Success and failure aspects of light rail planning
The report ‘Light Rail in Nederland, een studie naar de succes- en faalfactoren over de ontwikkeling van light rail-projecten in Nederland’, was performed by twelve students from the Technichal University of Delft, supervised by Rob vd Bijl and Niels van Oort. They investigated which factors could make or break a light rail project. During the last decades, the term light rail became a very known concept. As a hybrid mode with the best characteristics of train, tram and metro combined, light rail became an important and desired mode of transportation.
Nonetheless, several important light rail-projects failed. Some of these project were in a preliminary stage, whilst others were already quite advanced. One project so advanced, operation trials were already performed. Five cases on light rail projects in the Netherlands
and France (reference project) were extensively investigated. Not only the internal parts of the project were investigated (plan and development stages), but in particular the external context is set out. Political context and sustainability and urban development are
important external factors.
The investigation of five cases- Uithoflijn (Utrecht), RandstadRail (Rotterdam and The Hague), Regiotram (Groningen), RijnGouweLijn (Gouda and Leiden) and Straatsburg (France) – led to an overview of factors that will make or break a light rail-project. Important success factors can be found in the project organization, the political context and (external communication). Dangerous fail factors are found in the political domain, the project organizations and the decision-making process. Often, the success and risk factors which are involved in a light rail-project are a truism. It seems quite obvious that these factors are taken into account. Nevertheless, the failure of several important light rail-projects proves that –unfortunately- these factors are underestimated.
Read the summary here: Light rail research
Robust public transport from a passenger perspective
MSc.Thesis by Menno Yap (full report: HERE )
Summary:
Disturbances in public transport are an important issue for passengers, public transport operators and infrastructure managers. After the occurrence of large disturbances, there is often a strong call from passengers and society to make the public transport network less vulnerable – and therefore more robust – against these types of events. Despite the mentioned importance of considering robustness, the next limitations can be formulated regarding the way robustness of public transport networks is currently considered:
When evaluating and improving robustness of public transport networks against large non-recurrent disturbances, a passenger perspective is not included to its full extent. There is a strong focus on independent network levels operated by a single public transport operator, instead of considering the integral, multi-level public transport network available for passengers.
In general, limited quantitative data is available about disturbances which occur on multi-level public transport networks and about the effects of these disturbances on passengers. Also there is limited knowledge about the robustness performances of different network levels relative to each other. Given these limitations, the following main research question is formulated:
What methodology can be developed to evaluate the robustness of multi-level public transport networks and to evaluate robustness effects of measures for the case study network between Rotterdam and The Hague?
In this study, robustness is related only to major discrete events: large, non-recurrent events which affect infrastructure availability. In line with this, the next definition of robustness is used in this study:
‘Robustness is the extent to which the network is able to maintain the function it was originally designed for under circumstances which strongly deviate from plan’.
In this study, a methodology is developed which enables the evaluation of the current robustness of multi-level public transport networks, as well as the evaluation of proposed robustness measures. The case study shows that it is worth to consider another network level as back-up in case a certain network level is blocked. The result of the case study indicates that from a societal point of view, there is still room to improve the robustness of multi-level public transport networks.
The developed methodology can especially be developed further by incorporating en-route route choice possibilities in the transit assignment model. Further research is recommended especially to gain more knowledge about the behaviour of passengers in case they are confronted with major discrete events and in case they are confronted with crowded vehicles.
Big data opportunities to enhance public transport
New promising Big Data sources are becoming available in the Public Transport industry, via for instance Intermodal Transport Control Systems (ITCS). This data provides insights into both passenger flows and vehicle performance and is of great help to optimize public transport services. The data enables to evaluate ridership and compare it with use of other modes as car and bike traffic. In addition, whatif- predictions are possible to gain insights into expected level of cost coverage, service and ridership and to finally optimize the services.
Read more: ITCS and Big Data (IT TRANS2014)
Service reliability in a network context: impacts of synchronizing schedules in long headway services
This paper presents research on synchronization of transfers and its impact on service reliability from a passenger perspective. Passenger reliability is analyzed for the case of a multi-operator transfer node. A method is developed to calculate the passenger centered reliability indicators: additional travel time and reliability buffer time, using scheduled and actual vehicle arrival and departure times as an input. Five major factors are identified as affecting reliability at a particular transfer: scheduled transfer time, distributions of actual arrivals of the first and second line, headways, transfer walking time, and transfer demand. It is demonstrated in a real network case that changing a specific transfer has effects on other transfers from the transfer point. This method can be applied in a cost benefit analysis to identify the benefits and costs of reliability for different groups of passengers, thereby supporting proper decision making.
This paper won the Best Paper Award of all submissions by the TRB Committee on Transit Capacity and Quality of Service.
Read more: Paper Lee TRB 2014