Abstract
An integrated transport service fare system, supported by an agreement for ticket revenue sharing among service providers, is an essential component to improve the experience of the users who can find single tickets for the integrated transport services they look for. A challenge is to find a model to share the revenue which all providers agree on. A solution is to adopt data-driven approaches where user-generated data are collected to extract information on the extent each transport service was used. This is consistently used. However, it suffers from incomplete data, as not all users always validate their ticket when checking out or when switching lines. We studied all technologies available to support automatic ticket validation in order to record when the users access and exit each service line. The contributions of this work are the following: we give an in-depth description of the inner workings of this novel approach describing how we take advantage of each technology; we present the developed solution (Beep4Me), which adds new functionalities to an existing mobile ticketing platform; and we describe our testing framework, which includes most cases users might encounter during a trip. Our results demonstrate how it is possible to collect key data related to validations which can be used first for clearing purposes and then for network planning/fleet optimization.
Highlights
Urban road networks are increasingly suffering from frequent congestion, making it difficult to access urban centers and causing a strong environmental impact due to CO2 emissions
We show the analysis of our field tests, which aimed to try-out the system in almost every possible circumstance the users might encounter during their trips, and verify the new framework worked correctly in each one of them
After resolving the bugs identified mid-July and having found the correct calibration, the success rate of the tests reached 100%, exception made for the cases where the motion activity check (Figure 2) was disabled to test if the system could work correctly even without this technology, as mentioned previously
Summary
Urban road networks are increasingly suffering from frequent congestion, making it difficult to access urban centers and causing a strong environmental impact due to CO2 emissions. Since the users need to reach their destination (or destinations) from a defined starting point, for public transport to be competitive with other means of transport (mainly private vehicles), the best options available to them need to be those which allow them to finish their trip in a reasonable amount of time and with the lowest amount of effort For this purpose, the ideal solution would be that of creating a perfectly integrated public transport system in which the providers work together to create an almost seamless network, both in the spatial dimension (e.g., the bus stops/stations are the same for every company or they are very close to each other) and in the time one (e.g., users’ waiting times when transferring from a vehicle to the one should be as low as possible). This means that service providers in particular need valid and efficient methods to collect data regarding the number of passengers served with the same ticket by each of them, allowing them to implement the best strategies of measuring how ticket revenue has to be split
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