Service reliability measurement framework using smart card data : application to the London Underground

Service reliability is an important dimension of performance to transit passengers, affecting not only their perceptions of service quality, but their travel behaviour as well. The ability of transit operators to understand and improve reliability relies on their ability to measure it. Until recently, efforts to quantify this attribute of service from the perspective of passengers were limited by the small sample sizes obtained from manual surveys, or the use of supply-side data to indirectly capture the passenger experience. With the emergence of data from automated fare media, it becomes possible under certain conditions to directly observe travel times experienced by passengers and obtain improved estimates of the reliability of transit service. A framework is developed to estimate service reliability on heavy rail transit systems with both entry and exit fare control using data from Automated Fare Collection systems. A methodology is proposed as part of the framework to classify performance into incident-related and recurrent conditions in order to both gain new insight into the contribution of the different causes of unreliability as well as develop more robust measures of service reliability. The classification methodology is validated against incident log data corresponding to three origin-destination (O-D) pairs on the London Underground. Subsequently, the proposed framework is used to characterize the reliability of 800 Underground O-D pairs representing the highest-volume journeys on the system. Furthermore, models are estimated to quantify the effects of journey length, interchanges, and incident-related disruptions on reliability.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Uniman, David Louis

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• John P. Attanucci and Rabi G. Mishalani.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering.
• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/52806

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/52806