Journal of Public Transportation最新文献

Ticket payment and inspection are the two main dimensions of public transport (PT) ticketing for users. Both research and technological advances have focused mainly on improving the former. In contrast, this study explored users' preferences for ticket inspection options and identified some factors that influenced their likelihood of accepting “seamless ticket inspection”. The dataset is part of a two-wave survey that was collected along the Stockholm – Uppsala corridor to evaluate the Movingo integrated ticketing scheme, a smartcard and mobile phone-based multiple-county commuting ticket that applies to both intercity and intracity bus and train services across the six Mälardalen regions of Sweden. McNemar's test, one-way chi-squared goodness of fit test, multinomial and nested logit models were used to analyse the samples. The findings suggest that given five ticket inspection options, many of the respondents chose “seamless ticket inspection”. Major PT user groups such as females and young people are more likely to accept “seamless ticket inspection”. Further research is recommended on particular aspects of the envisaged “seamless ticket inspection”.

A growing body of research has addressed the multimodality of public transport, but relatively few studies have investigated the first-and-last-mile travel behavior—especially in the context of developing countries. In this study, we surveyed public transport commuters who live in Dhaka’s suburban areas and regularly commute to the main city. We find that the majority of the respondents use non-motorized modes of transportation (NMTs); however, the shares of motorized forms of transportation (MTs) such as human-haulers and buses are higher for egress compared to access. The choice of modes, both for the access and egress stages, are examined using multinomial logit (MNL) and nested logit (NL) models. The results show that rail travelers are more likely to choose MTs for egress compared to bus travelers. This is mainly because of longer distances between rail stations and trip destinations at the activity end. Among other factors, travelers’ income, and gender, as well as mode-specific attributes such as waiting time, travel time, travel cost, degree of seating comfort, and availability of the modes are found significant. Female commuters are more likely to choose rickshaw over other modes, while lower-income commuters show a higher tendency to choose paratransit and bus transportation when other variables are controlled. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of the findings for the improvement of first-and-last-mile connectivity of Dhaka’s public transportation system.

We present a method oriented to determine indicators representing different dimensions of users' travel time, such as in-vehicle time and its variability. We focus the service level measurement on users, but not their subjective perception, since we build the indicators from objective data. We apply the method to six Latin American cities, which shows the method's flexibility to fit different available information collected from sources such as in-field measurements or electronic control systems for bus operations. The method's core is the selection of a representative sample of trips. We estimate the service level based on different variables (e.g., speed, frequency, travel time, and waiting time) for every sampled trip. The contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a methodology for service level evaluation. As a byproduct, we compare public transportation systems' levels of service in the studied cities.

Transantiago, the public transport system implemented in Santiago, Chile, remains a controversial subject of public debate due to constantly increasing fare evasion rates throughout its decade-long existence. The research question under consideration in this paper is what motivates individuals to evade or pay bus fares. To answer this question, we developed a multidisciplinary study that combined relevant engineering expertise with a sociological perspective and combined quantitative analyses with qualitative methodologies to include new variables and categories that previous studies on the subject have omitted. We formulated a survey, which was administered to 503 public transport system users. The data we obtained were analyzed using a factor analysis. As a result, six dimensions were identified that explain motivations for fare evasion: (1) behavior and social norms, (2) the public transport service’s image, (3) social acceptance of evasion, (4) trip planning, (5) anti-evasion methods, and (6) fear of law enforcement.

Bus systems cannot be fully explored if issues such as safety of bus passengers on-board or at bus stops are not addressed. This study was aimed at assessing the safety of bus stops in Ibadan metropolis. Twenty bus stops were purposefully selected for this study from the five urban local government areas in Ibadan metropolis. A field survey involving interviews with 50 passengers and direct observations of hazardous acts was carried out at the bus stops. Casual factors of hazardous acts were noted as well. A score survey was conducted with 17 experts (civil engineers and transportation engineering researchers) where they were asked to rate how much each casual factor contributes to its corresponding hazardous act using a scale of 1–4 (1 being ‘not important at all’ and 4 being ‘very important’). Experts were also asked to make pairwise comparisons among hazardous acts and consistent responses were analyzed using Analytic Hierarchy process (AHP). Results from the score survey and AHP were used to model the safety levels of the selected bus stops. With safety levels ranging from 2.38 to 4.83 (10 being the best and 0 being the worst), all bus stops fell short of an acceptable level of safety. Also, Interviews conducted revealed passengers’ dissatisfaction with their user-experience. Recommendations were therefore made based on the findings.

Multimodality in Public Transport has been proven to be one of the main drivers of sustainability and economic feasibility for the last few decades. Consequently, user satisfaction for transfers is the key to adequately serving demand. This research studies on commuters’ perception of comfort at interchanges, focusing on the connection between metro systems and other modes. Satisfaction analysis and modelling is conducted using weighted regression, factor analysis and ordered logit models for nine transfers at major interchanges in two Indian cities (New Delhi and Kolkata) and one German city (Munich); aiming at revealing the differences in user satisfaction in developing and developed economy, and for different Public Transport quality and interchanges. The results indicate that factors of transfer quality, accessibility and physical hindrances are significant in Indian case and the human factor, and transfer quality are significant in the case of Munich, Germany. Additionally, it is found that perceived comfort differs on commuters’ experiences with transfer distance and time.

Demand responsive feeder transit can minimize passengers’ travel times and operator’s costs by optimizing routing based on real demand. One question about the demand response feeder transit operation is whether it can be optimized with door-to-door service or with temporary stops for picking up and delivering passengers. Obviously, door-to-door service eliminates passengers’ walking distances, but it increases passenger in-vehicle travel times and vehicle operating distance and costs. On the other hand, demand responsive feeder transit with temporary stops, which designates the temporary locations picking up and dropping passengers, minimizes bus operating distance and time as well as passenger in-vehicle times, although it increases passengers’ walking distances and times. The developed model uses metaheuristic approaches, including two main algorithms; a passenger’s clustering algorithm based on Particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach and a vehicle routing algorithm that uses simulated annealing (SA) solving method. The algorithm developed an optimal algorithm for clustering and grouping of passengers considering their physical locations and time windows then it was integrated with the authors’ previously developed algorithm for the optimal flexible feeder bus routing as a mixed integer model that objects to minimize the total costs including both passengers traveling times and operator’s operating costs The results of this study showed that although feeder networks with temporary stops always lower operating costs and lessen in-vehicle travel time compared to those with a door-to-door option, the total costs and optimal routings are highly sensitive to the location of passengers.

Peer comparison is a valuable management tool for identifying a transit provider’s areas of relative strength, areas with room for improvement, and high-performing peers to learn from. While the U.S. Rural National Transit Database (NTD) provides performance data about rural and small city transit providers, methods and tools have been lacking for these providers to apply NTD data to identify appropriate peers. This paper describes the development of a rural transit peer-grouping method as a counterpart to a method previously developed and implemented for urban providers, and compares this method to previous transit peer-grouping approaches. In contrast to most previous efforts, which have produced fixed and often large peer groups, this method dynamically and transparently identifies appropriate peers for individual rural and small city transit providers. The method has been implemented in freely available web-based software.

This paper empirically demonstrates the value of quasi-experimental study designs to evaluate the direct impacts of new public transit services on ridership within its corridor. Using a new bus rapid transit (BRT) service, CMAX, in Columbus, Ohio, USA, as an example, we compare its impact on ridership based on a pre-post and quasi-experimental analysis framework. We conduct the pre-post analysis using a ridership space-time cube exploring a massive Automatic Passenger Counter (APC) database. Differences in total passenger counts before and after the BRT intervention indicate a 36% increase in ridership within its corridor. However, this patronage increase may not be attributable solely to the new public transit service. Potential confounding effects include systemwide ridership trends and a new unlimited transit pass program for downtown workers. To address these issues, we adopt a quasi-experimental study design with a difference-in-differences (DiD) identification strategy. We use propensity score matching (PSM) to match a counterfactual control group with the treatment group when implementing DiD model. After accounting for confounding effects, we find a less than 5% increase but not statistically significant impacts of CMAX on ridership. Our results support the argument that a simple pre-post analysis ignoring confounding effects can lead to a misleading evaluation of a new public transit service’s direct impact on ridership.

Understanding the factors and drivers of user satisfaction with public transportation (PT) systems has been a subject of research for decades, as it provides insight into influencing ridership increases. This research addresses user satisfaction using SEM-MIMIC models to analyze three PT bus subsystems in the same city (Bogotá Colombia): A Bus Rapid Transit, a formalized bus subsystem, and a semi-formalized one that operates simultaneously. After developing three independent models, we found the same three latent variables (LVs), namely subsystems “condition”, “service”, and “safety/security”, in each one. However, the strength and significance of the direct and indirect effects among the three LVs vary from one subsystem to another. In general, satisfaction is initially based on a person’s perception of the subsystem’s condition and ends with his/her perception of the service, with safety and service being the mediating variables to explain satisfaction. Unlike previous studies, we were able to identify relationships among these three independent variables for each subsystem, allowing us to assess the direct and indirect effects on overall subsystem satisfaction. This research provides decision-makers with a broader understanding of how infrastructure, vehicles, operational attributes, and regulation processes influence user satisfaction through perceptions and how they can help improve the PT service for its users.