Obtaining public transport level-of-service measures using in-vehicle GPS data and freely available GIS web-based tools

摘要

Information technology has set new standards within public transport system managementstrategies, and renewed attention has been paid to vehicle level-of-service (LOS) performancemeasurement techniques in recent years. Specifically, in-vehicle GPS technology provides agood opportunity to collect substantial amounts of useful data for accurate public transport LOSmeasuring. Handling these rich data can be labour intensive, time consuming and challenging,especially in highly dense networks. Systematic, easy to apply, and inexpensive techniques toprocess information quickly and display LOS outcomes efficiently are required.The main aim of this paper is to present a procedure to obtain LOS measures at any spatial andtemporal aggregation level in the case of dense bus networks using freely available map andgeographic software. The proposed methodology is highly flexible as it can accommodate eitherfixed or variable space-time aggregations; it can handle vast amounts of GPS data yielding LOSresults relatively quickly. Furthermore, it can be implemented at relatively low cost in terms ofsoftware requirements, using freely available software.An illustration of the proposed procedure and its results to obtain LOS measures among busstops is reported, using the geographic location of bus stops and offline GPS data available(every 30 seconds) for all operating buses in Santiago´s public transport system.