BENEFITS OF STANDARDISATION OF BUS TRANSIT AUTOMATIC VEHICLE LOCATION DATA OUTPUTS TO THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY

摘要

Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) systems offer transit agencies and the academiccommunity vast quantities of data on the operation of bus transit networks. However turningthis raw data into useful metrics that are of interest can be quite cumbersome and require asignificant amount of processing of AVL log files. There would be many benefits to bothtransit agencies and academia if such metrics were output in a standardised format by theAVL system.This paper summarises existing data exchange standards used in the bus transit industryand explains the benefits of these. It then describes a recent project undertaken by LondonBuses to analyse dwell time data, and highlights the difficulties and costs involved incollecting the basic data required for this analysis. It proposes that more data standardsshould be defined for data output by AVL systems. If these standards were thenimplemented by AVL vendors this would mean that transit agencies and academics could geteasy access to useful information which otherwise would require much time and cost inobtaining.