AN APPLICATION-ORIENTED MODEL OF PASSENGER WAITING TIME BASED ON BUS DEPARTURE TIME INTERVALS

摘要

Developing a reliable and practical method to estimate passenger waiting time becomes a keyissue in the evaluation of service quality for public transit systems. However, existing methodslack of applicability in practices due to the need of the costly data collection. This paperdevelops an application-oriented model to estimate the waiting time as a function of busdeparture time intervals. First, distributions of passenger arrival rates for two types of bus stopsare analyzed based on field data collected in Beijing. Bus stops are classified into Type A and B,depending on whether they are connected with urban rail transit systems. The results show thatthe lognormal distribution has the best fit for Type A bus stop, and gamma distribution providesthe best fit for Type B bus stop. Second, considering the convenience to extract the data of busdeparture times from existing intelligent transit systems, the relationship between passengerarrival rates and bus departure time intervals is analyzed. It is demonstrated that parameters ofthe passenger arrival rate distribution for both two types of stops can be expressed by theaverage and CV (Coefficient of Variation) of bus departure time intervals in functionalrelationships. Then, an application-oriented waiting time model is proposed. Finally, a modelvalidation is conducted, resulting in the NMSE (Normalized Mean Square Error) of 0.0854 and0.0126 for Type A and B stops, respectively. Thus, the proposed model is shown to provide areliable estimation of the average passenger waiting time based on only readily available busdeparture time intervals.