Analysis of Bus Travel Time Variability using Automatic Vehicle Location Data

Abstract

Transit service reliability is a measure of the quality of service offered by the public transit systems. The nature and pattern of the travel time variability can be described by the travel time distribution and it is the prerequisite in the reliability analysis. Many research works have been carried out to understand the travel time distribution, but there are very few studies on the heterogeneous traffic in developing countries like India. In this study, an attempt has been made to analyze the travel time distribution at different spatial and temporal aggregation scales using Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) data of public bus route in Mysore city. The results suggest that, Generalised extreme value (GEV) distribution is the better fit for travel times at both route and segment levels and the performance of the Generalised extreme value (GEV) distribution is comparatively better in both temporal and spatial aggregation compared to other distributions. This distribution can be utilized by the transit operators in the operation and performance evaluation of transit systems. © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.