Leveraging electronic device outputs for service quality assessment of public transportation systems: An initial look at the Philippines’ service contracting program through data analytic lens

Abstract

Electronic devices such as CCTVs and GPS trackers are becoming more prevalent in public utility vehicles. These electronic devices produce data that can be aggregated and processed to generate insights regarding the service quality provided by public transportation systems. We describe a methodology for processing CCTV-produced videos and GPS logs, and utilize it to perform a first order, limited assessment of the Philippines’ Service Contracting Program, which ran during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analyses uncovered vast discrepancies between data-supported figures and manually-generated estimates provided by the transport operators, especially with regards to vehicle occupancy and total number of commuters served. Our study also uncovered imperfections in the data generated by the electronic devices, which place caveats or limitations on the insights generated by the data analyses. We provide and suggest ways on how the analyses can be modified to take into account such missing data, thus enabling us to come up with educated, reasonable insights despite incomplete input datasets.