Public Transport Information Research Articles

User information needs for hybrid public transport systems in Cape Town, South Africa

Public transport information imbalances are rife in cities with hybrid systems composed of scheduled and unscheduled modes, hindering users’ ability to access mobility. Though private and public entities alike are seeking information-based technological solutions to aid users to navigate these systems, there is still little understanding of what information users need to navigate these complex hybrid systems. Particularly for captive public transport users who do not have access to private alternative means of travel, access to relevant information across all modes could enable access to information on trips that better suit their needs and preferences. Through semi-structured interviews followed by a best-worst scaling survey with captive public transport users in Cape Town, South Africa, this study investigates what information users need to plan non-routine hybrid journeys. Information needs are extensive, ranging beyond that which is publicly offered, not only on available transport services in isolation, but also across these collective services. This paper provides a method for investigating the information needs of users to enable policy makers to better align information and data strategies to support the integration of hybrid public transport systems through passenger information.

A methodological application of the capability approach to investigate access to multimodal public transport information in a hybrid network

While information and communications technologies offer avenues for disseminating information to help passengers navigate multimodal systems, they also come with challenges in the form of usefulness of information content, imbalances in information supply across modes, and barriers to information access. This paper reflects on the design of a mixed methods approach framed within Amartya Sen's capability approach for investigating and addressing these challenges. Using Cape Town, South Africa as a lens of study, this paper investigates user information needs, technology capabilities related to mobility information, and informational capabilities of captive public transport users to access multimodal mobility information through technology.

RUJATRANS Application (Android-based Public Transportation Travel Route Information) using Waterfall Model

This research aims to help the public to provide public transportation information. By using this application, it is hoped that people can choose the right and efficient transportation to travel. Rujatrans (public transportation travel route information) uses waterfall model. The system includes an Android mobile app, which allows users to search for the right and efficient transport travel route while traveling. The four phases of the system are data collection, design, implementation, and testing. The system provides a user- friendly interface to provide public transport travel routes efficiently. This study uses a structured and iterative approach, resulting in solutions when you want to travel using public transportation that meets user needs. Rujatrans can provide solutions to reduce the use of private vehicles so as to reduce congestion on the highway.

A Study on Mitigating the Disparity in Public Transportation Information Usage among the Elderly through Expert Delphi Survey

A Study on Mitigating the Disparity in Public Transportation Information Usage among the Elderly through Expert Delphi Survey

Exploring the role of public transport information sources on perceived service quality in suburban rail

Information is a powerful tool to enhance the perceived service quality of public transport. Online information sources have become very popular and coexist with traditional sources like posters and signage, however it remains unclear whether those sources impact evenly to the service perception. This paper aims to explore the influence of different information sources on the service attributes and perceived service quality. For that, we take data from the annual Traveller Satisfaction Survey of the suburban rail of Madrid Region and adapt a robust service quality assessment framework to consider information sources. First, four passenger segments arise according to their preferred information source, including online and offline. Then, we assess the perceived service quality of each segment using a combination of CART and IPA techniques. Results expose a relevant role of information on the suburban rail service satisfaction, contrarily to previous studies focused on urban rail. We have also detected some heterogeneity on the relative importance of attributes depending on the information role: online-informed passengers care most about core attributes while traditionally informed passengers are more influenced by comfort. Last, the IPA reveals a general need to improve service reliability, train supply and up-to-date information.

Empowering people with visual disabilities through rural tourism: the benefits of nature activities and how the various travel constraints can be overcome

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to identify the main constraints faced by people with visual disabilities (PwVD) when visiting a rural destination, as well as the benefits sought through their participation in rural tourism. Furthermore, this study also intends to identify the main strategies used by PwVD to overcome the barriers encountered in rural destinations. A triangulation of qualitative methods was used to collect and analyse data, comprising various online forums and blogs posts related to the tourism experiences of PwVD, together with fifteen semi-structured interviews conducted with Portuguese PwVD. The results reveal that PwVD find rural destinations compelling and that they look for sensorial stimuli in nature as a means for self-development and relaxation, while the lack of public transport and accessible information dissuades PwVD from seeking rural tourism experiences. These constraints are often overcome with the use of various smartphone apps, the aid of travel companions, or the help of residents. Based on the results obtained in this study, a set of guidelines is proposed to improve the level of accessibility of rural tourism destinations, contributing to the empowerment of PwVD.

Should I stay or should I board? Willingness to wait with real-time crowding information in urban public transport

Overcrowding is a major phenomenon affecting travel experience in urban public transport, whose negative impacts can be potentially mitigated with real-time crowding information (RTCI) on public transport vehicle departures. In this study, we investigate the willingness to wait (WTW) with instantaneous RTCI to avoid the in-vehicle (over)crowding the passenger faces, focusing specifically on urban crowding context (i.e. bus and tram systems). We conduct a stated-preference survey in Krakow (Poland), where we examine the choice probability between boarding now a more crowded vehicle vs. waiting at the stop for a less-crowded PT departure, and estimate a series of discrete choice models.Results show that 50–70% of respondents consider skipping a first departure which is excessively overcrowded and 10–30% would skip a vehicle with moderate standing crowding on-board. Acceptable waiting times typically range between 2 and 13 min, depending on crowding level and propensity to arrive on-time, but may even exceed 20 min in individual cases. These findings indicate that RTCI can induce a substantial WTW, affecting travel behaviour. We discuss its implications for mitigating service disruptions and demand management policies, including prospective support for public transport recovery in the aftermath of covid-19 crisis.

Electronic Service Quality: Public Transport Information on the Internet

As public transport companies market new self-service technologies, it has become increasingly important to understand the factors affecting the users’ perceived service quality of these services. Electronic Service Quality has been broadly defined as encompassing all phases of a customer’s interaction with a website. The E-S-QUAL scale comprises four dimensions. This article investigates the importance of three of the suggested quality dimensions (efficiency, system availability, and fulfillment) for overall satisfaction when using information-based websites. A survey was conducted with respondents being asked to use and evaluate an existing website delivering public transport information in their region. The results revealed that efficiency (addressing the ease and speed of using the site) was most important for overall satisfaction. Furthermore, it is concluded that a modified E-S-QUAL scale is appropriate for this purpose as it was possible to adapt it to a pure service-related website.

Critical Appraisal of Web-Based Passenger Information Systems

Passenger information is vital for developing a user-friendly public transportation system. Websites are rapidly gaining popularity for public transport information dissemination, particularly due to their anytime-anywhere availability and their suitability for the multimodal applications and multilingual interface. Internet-based Passenger Information Systems (PIS), therefore, have become common in developed countries. The development of PIS for urban transport in India however, is at an experimental stage with very few operational deployments. This paper attempts to examine the current state-of-the-art features in Web-based passenger information systems in India and abroad, while critically evaluating the existing sources of public transport information in Ahmedabad as a case study. Ahmedabad, like several other Indian cities, has fixed-route regular bus services in conjunction with a recently-introduced bus rapid transit (BRT) system. The study compares the information content in printed transit timetables, Google Transit, and websites of the transit agencies, with the spatial dataset of public transport network prepared by integrating information from several sources. The results highlight the issues pertaining to accuracy, coverage, and timeliness of information contents available in developing countries, requiring innovative technological interventions to meet the growing information needs of commuters.

Effects of a Public Real-Time Multi-Modal Transportation Information Display on Travel Behavior and Attitudes

This study reports on an experiment in downtown Seattle, Washington, to evaluate whether installing a public real-time multi-modal transportation information display screen in an office building lobby caused changes in building occupant self-reported awareness, attitudes, satisfaction, and usage of alternative transportation modes including transit, car-sharing, ride-sourcing, and bike-sharing services. Workers in the test building and two nearby control buildings were surveyed immediately before the screen was installed (N=550) and again six months later (N=455). Little evidence was found that exposure to the real-time display affected respondent travel choices, satisfaction, familiarity, or attitudes toward alternative modes. Although most respondents (70%) had noticed the screen and had generally positive reactions, two-thirds of this group never actually used it. These results, along with building occupant responses to open-ended questions, indicate limited benefits from this installation and suggest that site selection, screen placement, and marketing may help to maximize the effects of these types of displays on traveler satisfaction and mode shifting.

33507 Parking fees: A significant financial burden for phototherapy patients

Phototherapy treatment for dermatologic conditions often requires 2 or 3 treatment sessions weekly at designated facilities. Nonmedical costs, such as parking fees, are associated with discontinuation of phototherapy. This cross-sectional study assesses the association between parking fees, cost of living, and transit access at phototherapy sites across the United States. Phototherapy sites affiliated with dermatology residency programs were identified. The following information for each site was ascertained: address, transit score, cost of living score, online public transit information, parking rates, and validation. Mean, median, and range of each score and Pearson correlations for binary variables were calculated. Of 343 phototherapy sites, 314 (91.5%) responded to information requests. Of participating sites, 69 (22.0%) did not offer phototherapy services. Parking fee information was obtained from 239 (70.0%) sites. 177 (74.1%) offered free or validated parking, and 78 (32.6%) displayed public transportation information on their website. Daily parking costs were positively correlated with cost of living (r2 = 0.102, P < .001) and transit scores (r2 = 0.055, P < .001). The average daily cost of parking was $3.29, amounting to $513.24 for patients completing 3 phototherapy sessions weekly per year. Parking fees represent a significant financial barrier to patients undergoing phototherapy treatment, especially if multiple times per week. Cities with a higher cost of living have less affordable parking, compounding financial barriers. With increased usage of phototherapy services among Medicare beneficiaries, it is important for clinicians to be aware of additional financial barriers, such as parking fees, that further contribute to health disparities in the population.

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION PORTAL FOR COMMUTERS

Public transportation saves money, makes travel easier, and so enhances opportunities and property value. It also minimizes air pollution, relieves traffic congestion, and provides job opportunities for millions of people. Trains, buses, and other forms of public transportation that operate on regular routes and charge predetermined prices are referred to as public transportation. This mode of transportation is an important aspect of every society because of the role it plays. That is why most municipal governments offer incentives for residents to use public transportation and leave their personal vehicles at home. Apart from being cost-effective, public transportation can alleviate a number of issues that cities confront, particularly those with heavy car dependency. Crude oil prices, which rose well beyond $100 per barrel as a result of the demandsupply gap and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, may also come back faster than they climbed. The main objective of this system is to provide an application that allows residents and visitors of a city to find out more about transportation-related aspects of the city. Aspects include information about public transportation options, schedules, fares, and so forth (education). The site might also provide real-time information about buses and other public transportation information. This application software has been computed successfully and was also tested successfully by taking “test cases”. It is user-friendly and has the required options, which can be utilized by the user to perform the desired operations. The software is developed using Java as the front end and Oracle as the back end in a Windows environment. The goals that are achieved by the software are: Optimum utilization of resources, Efficient management of records, Simplification of the operations, Less processing time and getting required information, User friendly, and Portable and flexible for further enhancement.

Developing public transport messaging to provide crowding information during COVID-19: Application of the COM-B model and behaviour change wheel

The COVID-19 outbreak meant that using public transport was potentially unsafe for risk of catching and transmitting the virus. UK anxiety is high with lockdowns preventing a normal way of life for over a year. A lack of ability to travel freely causes numerous declines in quality of life including social isolation and poor physical and mental health. People need crowding information to choose safer travel options and subdue coronavirus. To provide effective guidance, it is essential to empirically formulate messaging to create clarity and trust which can be acted upon in confidence. Behaviour Change Techniques incorporating the Behaviour Change Wheel and COM-B model have been utilised in vast areas of public health intervention development and messaging. There is consensus that public transport information needs to be clearer and more accessible but BCTs have not been utilised in the development of public transport advice. This paper outlines the development of crowding messaging for public transport on a platform available to UK travellers. Barriers and facilitators were explored; related behaviours, intervention functions and behaviour change techniques were mapped. Specific message phrasing was developed utilising the mapped functions and advice from the literature. With the COVID-19 outbreak, having accessible and effective messaging for safely using public transport is a continuation of the work recently conducted examining the best ways to present public health information. It is important to be transparent when developing messaging and interventions accessible to the public and this work forms a basis for continued exploration and development in this area.

NAPC: A Neural Algorithm for Automated Passenger Counting in Public Transport on a Privacy-Friendly Dataset

Real-time load information in public transport is of high importance for both passengers and service providers. Neural algorithms have shown a high performance on various object counting tasks and play a continually growing methodological role in developing automated passenger counting systems. However, the publication of public-space video footage is often contradicted by legal and ethical considerations to protect the passengers&#x2019; privacy. This work proposes an end-to-end Long Short-Term Memory network with a problem-adapted cost function that learned to count boarding and alighting passengers on a publicly available, comprehensive dataset of approx.13,000 manually annotated low-resolution 3D LiDAR video recordings (depth information only) from the doorways of a regional train. These depth recordings do not allow the identification of single individuals. For each door opening phase, the trained models predict the correct passenger count (ranging from 0 to 67) in approx.96&#x0025; of boarding and alighting, respectively. Repeated training with different training and validation sets confirms the independence of this result from a specific test set.

IMPLEMENTATION OF THE TRANSPORTASIKU SYSTEM POLICY TO EASY PUBLIC TRANSPORT INFORMATION IN THE CITY OF SURABAYA

The research aims to find out the implementation of Transportasiku system policy in providing easy transportation information to the public in the Surabaya city area through one application, the factors that hinder the implementation of this Transportasiku System policy, and the efforts in dealing with obstacles to the implementation of the policy. The research method used is a type of qualitative research. Informants in this study are the officials who are responsible for the manufacture of Transportasiku, the developer of Transportasiku and the public who use Transportasiku. The data collection techniques used is with interviews and documentation. The techniques used in data analysis is data reduction, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. The results of the research show that: 1) The implementation of Transportasiku system policy to facilitate public transportation information in the city of Surabaya like communication, disposition, and bureaucratic structure. 2) The factors that hinder the implementation of the policy are limited human resources, limited available budgetary resources, limited equipment to support the implementation of the policy, and the occurrence of system errors when Transportasiku system underwent maintenance. 3) The efforts of the Department of Transportation in this case is the division of tasks and the quality of qualified human resources and good performance of existing human resources, to manage the availability of budget resources, to take advantage and do maintenance facilities available periodicly, and perform a reset or system development so that problems with the use of Transportasiku System can be resolved.

Impact of Data Cleansing for Urban Bus Commercial Speed Prediction

Public Transportation Information Systems (PTIS) are widely used for public bus services amongst cities in the world. These systems gather information about trips, bus stops, bus speeds, ridership, etc. This massive data are an inviting source of information for machine learning predictive tools. However, it most often suffers from quality deficiencies, due to multiple data sets with multiple structures, to different infrastructures using incompatible technologies, to human errors or hardware failures. In this paper, we consider the impact of data cleansing on a classical machine-learning task: predicting urban bus commercial speed. We show that simple, transport specific business and quality rules can drastically enhance data quality, whereas more sophisticated rules may offer little improvements despite a high computational cost.

Traffic Flow Forecasting Analysis based on Two Methods

Along with the rapid growth of China’s economy and the continuous improvement of the national living standard, the number of private cars traveling on the road is gradually increasing, and the traffic congestion problem has become the focus of people’s attention. In order to solve this big problem, the most important thing is to improve the development of public transportation, conduct scientific and reasonable public transportation scheduling, and realize the green transportation. The prediction of public transportation information is the key point of public transportation scheduling. In this study, the part of public transportation information, traffic flow, is selected for research, and the collected historical information is preprocessed and characterized. Using the weather factor as the input characteristic, the historical traffic flow is divided into 15-minute interval and 1-hour interval data sets, and two models, gradient boosting decision tree and wavelet neural network, are used to predict the traffic flow of road sections. The experimental results show that the gradient boosting decision tree model based on the 15-minute interval has high prediction accuracy and good generalization performance.

Designing an Intelligent Real-Time Public Transportation Monitoring System Based on IoT

In recent years, smart public transportation has become one of the most important things for developing cities and improving people’s quality of life. Public transportation users face many problems, the most important of which is the long wait at the bus station. The proposed system in this paper helps users of public transportation to find public transportation, arrival times, and other information from any place and at any time using a mobile application. The main objective of the prototype is to reduce the wait time at the bus station by knowing the nearest buses to a user, the real-time location of buses on the Google map to help passengers track buses in real-time, the arrival time of buses, and speed. The system was implemented based on Internet of Things (IoT) technology, by using the Global Positioning System (GPS), a microcontroller with a built-in Wi-Fi module (ESP32), and a mobile user interface by the Blynk IoT platform. The proposed system has been implemented and tested in real-time, where all data obtained is displayed by the GPS sensors for bus locations (longitude and latitude) and speed on the smartphone application. The distance between the bus location and the passenger that will appear in the mobile app was calculated by using the Haversine formula. It measured the accuracy of the distance obtained based on a study of several days at different times on multiple roads in Mosul city and compared it with the actual distance. The average difference between the calculated values computed by the Haversine equation compared to the data obtained from the actual distance is (177 meters) with a minimum error of 8 meters. The arrival time of each bus was calculated based on the distance and average speed of the bus registered along the road.

Implementation of connection scan algorithm in tourism intermodal transportation journey planner: a case study

Accessibility to tourist destinations is an important component in a tourism system, especially for natural tourist destinations located in suburban areas. Good linkage of travel information and physical connections with local transportation services for intercity travel can facilitate more people to travel and promote national tourism destinations. This research takes the popular national tourism destinations and their public transportation service in Taiwan as a research object due to the unavailability of integrated public transport information service. Free Independent Travelers (FIT) demand is growing. This research aims to integrate intermodal public transportation information to support FIT by proposing a seamless way journey planner. In this scenario, the journey planner requires timetable data as input. The Connection Scan Algorithm is used to find the earliest arrival time routes at their destinations. This journey planner is built in PHP language and can complement the official tourism travel information website by Tourism Bureau, MOTC. Hence, the FIT could get the quickest routes to reach the destinations without compiling the public transportation information provided independently.

The Rio's transport legacy: pre- and post-Games resident perceptions

PurposeThe Rio 2016 Olympic Games required a significant investment in the public transport systems, connecting four city's areas and providing different types of impacts and legacies for their hosts. The purpose of this paper is to examine resident perceptions of the public transportation issues in the Rio host city before and after the Games. Key factors underpinning transportation issue outcomes are identified.Design/methodology/approachData were collected among Rio local residents by using a pre-Games (n = 504) and post-Games design (n = 421). The cross-sectional and longitudinal data were assessed at both time periods. An exploratory factor analysis revealed five factors, and a confirmatory factor analysis analysed the psychometric properties of the constructs proposed. Subsequently, MANOVA and a series of ANOVA tests (one-way and paired samples) were performed to analyse the differences in perceptions before and after the Games.FindingsResults revealed a five-factor model of public transportation issues perceived: planning, infrastructure, insecurity, information and urban mobility. Resident perceptions for four factors (planning, infrastructure, insecurity, urban mobility) increased from pre- to post-Games, meaning that they have a more negative perspective about those issues. In contrast, the findings suggested an improvement in public transport information perceived between the period before and after the Games.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the academic literature related to discussing the Olympic legacy by providing evidence of how hosting the Olympics may lead to social exchange with negative outcomes on transport legacy. The findings of this study can be used as valuable information for future event organizers, local authorities and governments.