Impact of Side Friction on Travel Time Reliability of Urban Public Transit

Abstract

Travel time reliability is the key aspect that indicates the quality of urban public transit service. The studies on travel time reliability of the public transit system in Indian traffic conditions are few. Also, the impact of side friction elements on travel time reliability has not been considered in the previous studies. Hence, the present study aims to quantify the different types of side friction elements and analyse their impact on the travel time reliability of the public bus transit system. The field data consisting of side friction elements, traffic volume, and travel time of public bus transit have been collected and extracted at two different road sections (divided and undivided) in the Mysore city (Karnataka, India) during weekdays and weekends. The data are grouped into static and dynamic side frictions. An approach has been proposed to represent different types of side friction elements with a single index called the Side Friction Index (SFI) using relative weight analysis. Travel time reliability is represented using measures such as Buffer Time Index (BTI), Planning Time Index (PTI), Travel Time Index (TTI) and Reliable Buffer Index (RBI). The impact of side friction on travel time reliability was found to be sensitive to traffic volume, and hence the thresholds for different traffic volume levels have been determined using K-means clustering method. It was observed from relative weight analysis that the static side friction has a higher weightage (0.509 and 0.327 for the undivided road and divided road respectively) than the dynamic side friction elements in describing the variation of travel time. The impact of side friction on reliability measures at different traffic volume levels has been studied and found to have a non-linear (exponential) relationship. The impact of SFI has been observed to be higher on TTI and PTI in comparison with BTI. The study outcomes show that the impact of side friction on TTI and PTI is sensitive to traffic volume, especially at higher traffic volume level and impact of side friction on BTI is less, especially at medium traffic volume level. The inference from the study shows that the impact of side friction elements varies with respect to the type of road (divided and undivided), traffic volume levels, different days of week (weekday and weekend), and different time periods of day.