Analysis of Crowding Effect on Passengers’ Movement Time Based on Smart Card Data

Abstract

As a key component of bus dwell time, passenger movement time in boarding and alighting processes plays an important role in affecting service reliability and service quality. Boarding and alighting processes are impacted by several factors, including vehicle configuration, friction between boarding and alighting passengers, bus floor level, and fare payment methods. The crowding effect refers to the interaction between passengers boarding, alighting, and on-board. In this paper, we introduce two indices, namely rank and occupancy, to describe the crowding effect. Rank reflects the sequence of passengers boarding and alighting, which reveals how passengers’ movement time changes in boarding/alighting process. Occupancy indicates level of crowdedness in vehicle, and quantifies the friction from on board passengers during boarding and alighting process. Based on time-stamped smart card transactions, we measured the inter-tapping interval between two successive boarding (alighting) passengers to identify the effect of rank and occupancy in determining boarding/alighting processes. Before our analysis, a cluster based outlier detection method is applied to guarantee data quality. Using large quantities of boarding/alighting observations from smart card data, we found that both rank and occupancy have strong effects on boarding and alighting processes. For occupancy, 60% is a critical threshold for boarding process, after which a dramatic increase of average boarding time is observed. This research may help better understand the passenger behavior in boarding and alighting processes.