Bangkok Taxi Service Behavior Analysis using Taxi Probe Data and Questionnaire Survey

Abstract

Taxi service is one of the vital aspects in social life of urban population. They are used as the most convenient ad-hoc public transportation mean for convenient and quick commute. However, a lot of complains, frustration and dissatisfactory entries are found in social network platforms such as Facebook, Line, Twitter, etc. In order to provide the solution to these issues, a thorough understanding of taxi driver characteristics and their service behaviors is required. In this study, questionnaire survey and Probe data have been used to analyze the real situation and findings are presented in term of graphs and tables. The results suggested that current technology integrated with social behavior could be a powerful way to solve the real world problems. This study firstly has helped us to understand the taxi drivers' characteristics, secondly has found no significance difference between Taxi Probe data and survey data and hence Probe data can be used for further study of travel service behavior and finally suggested to perform zonal analysis of taxi service considering the fact that taxi service zone can be different from administrative zone and each zone bear unique behavior. This study is based on the hypothesis that taxi probe data can be used as complementary data in addition to the primary data collected from taxi drivers to reveal the driving characteristics and travel behavior. It is believed that the travel characteristic of different place is different at different time of a day. By performing t-Test, we test the null hypothesis that there is highly significance similarity between the results obtained from taxi probe data and that from questionnaire survey. Moreover, this study can be used as a baseline guide for future research in Taxi Probe data and service behavior in Thailand or any other urban area in the world.