A Methodology to Estimate Passenger Flow: Riverside Line, Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, Boston, MA

摘要

The work documented in this report represents part of an endeavor to develop improvements in management techniques to operate local transit systems more efficiently and economically. In particular, the ability to accurately ascertain route specific passenger flows or passenger demands has become essential for adequate resource allocation and scheduling of transit runs. This raises the requirement to develop an optimal survey procedure for the estimation of passenger profiles/distributions along the route. The report presents the results and description of a methodology to collect boarding and deboarding passenger data on the Riverside Line of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority and to estimate for each station along the route an average passenger flow profile by half-hourly time periods. Such profiles can then be fed into a scheduling model which simulates and accommodates passenger congestion at various points in time. It is a culmination of several small-scale passenger surveys and a statistical model employing indicator variables and the survey data to estimate the station and time factors for the derivation of average flow rates per minute. The results prove that relatively inexpensive sampling techniques can result in acceptable estimates of ridership by route.