Measuring temporal and spatial travel efficiency for transit route system using low-frequency bus automatic vehicle location data

Abstract

Although the bus probe data have been widely adopted for examining the transit route efficiency, this application cannot guarantee the accuracy in special temporal and spatial segments due to the inadequate probe samples. This study evaluates the feasibility of automatic vehicle location data as probes for the bus route travel time evaluation. Our techniques explore the minimum requirement of transit automatic vehicle location data to recover the bus trajectories in various spatial–temporal dimensions along the scheduled transit routes. First, a three-dimensional tensor is established to infer the uncovered link traveling information in current time slots and the last short-term period. Then, a general form is proposed to calculate the local mean travel speed and the average link travel time in each separated time slot of day. Finally, a case study has been conducted using field transit automatic vehicle location data running on a bus route corridor in Edmonton, Canada. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of low-frequency bus automatic vehicle location data as probes for transit route efficiency measurement by comparing with baseline approaches. This work also supports the feasibility of using automatic vehicle location–equipped buses as customized buses for choosing alternate path based on evaluating the current transit efficiency on all routes.