Characterizing Journey Time Performance on Urban Metro Systems under Varying Operating Conditions

Abstract

Automated fare collection (AFC) data provide opportunities for improved measurement of public transport service quality from the passenger perspective. In this paper, AFC data from the London Underground are used to measure service quality through an analysis of journey time performance under regular and incident-affected operating conditions. The analysis involves two parts: (i) parametrically defining the shape of journey time distributions, and (ii) defining three performance metrics based on the moments of the distributions to measure the mean and variance of journey times. The metrics show that mean journey times are longest during the afternoon peak across all lines analyzed, and are more variable during the afternoon and off-peak periods depending on the line. Under incident conditions, mean journey times range from 8% to 39% longer compared with regular conditions, depending on the line. Overall, the main application of this work is that the metrics presented here can be directly applied by operators to quantify customer journey time performance, and can be further extended for industry-wide application to compare performance across metro networks.