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Knowledge of ridership data on bus routes is pivotal for the quality and efficient operational planning of public transport companies. Automatic passenger counting (APC) can represent a powerful resource for supporting this activity, because it can provide a databank of accurate counts. However, relevant challenges, such as the matching of data to the bus stop, data validation, tackling anomalies, and building intelligible performance reports, must be faced in order to make APC data a mainstream source of information. This paper proposes an offline framework for addressing these challenges. In order to illustrate a possible application of the framework, its use for setting bus frequencies is investigated. The results are represented by easy-to-read control dashboards composed of tables and graphs. The methodology is experimentally tested with data records provided by the bus operator CTM in Cagliari, Italy. Finally, we discuss the implications on service rearrangement.

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Bus regularity is a crucial factor for high frequency public transport systems, because it represents a relevant measure of quality of service for both users and transit agencies. Low regularities for users are associated with bunching phenomena or large gaps between buses, which result in low attractiveness of the service for transit agencies. Therefore, evaluating the regularity is extremely desirable, but may also be a complex task in medium-size cities due to the huge amount of data which must be collected and processed effectively. Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) technologies, which are particularly used by transit agencies in Western Europe, can address the data collection problem, but they involve several challenges such as correcting anomalies in collected raw data and processing information efficiently. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically handle AVL raw data for measuring the Level of Service (LoS) of bus regularity at each bus stop and time interval of any high frequency route. The results are represented by easy-to-read control dashboards and graphs.We discuss the experimentation of this method in a real case study to provide insights into the detailed characterization of bus regularity. The method is applied to data obtained from the transport agency CTM in Cagliari (Italy), whose vehicles are all equipped with AVL technologies