The Impact of Weather Conditions on Urban Bus Ridership

Abstract

The existing literatures on the impact of weather on urban bus ridership have concentrated on the aggregate bus ridership. However, the differences in bus users’ features make the impact different and little research concerns on this. This paper aims to examine the various impacts of weather on the bus ridership divided by bus users’ feature in order to fill this gap. We get hourly urban bus ridership from Harbin, China for January to June 2014 by collecting Harbin smart card data. And use multiple linear regression model to analyze the influence of weather on bus ridership which varies based on bus users’ age (student, adult, the elderly), weekends and weekdays, peak and off-peak, frequent and occasional, regular and irregular. Results show that the elderly are more greatly affected by the weather compared with adults, and students are barely affected. Bus users traveling on weekday or in off-peak hour are prone to change the way of travel because of the weather’s impact. Regular bus users are less affected by the weather. The results provide an approximate way to forecast the bus ridership which can help the bus agencies to provide better bus service.