Performance Analysis of Public Bus Transport Services in Rural Areas

Abstract

This study investigated the performance of rural public bus transport services in Jordan Valley. The performance measures included availability, comfort and convenience, waiting time, mobility, productivity and safety. The data used in this research was collected from three sources: field survey of existing bus routes, operational data from Land Transport Regulatory Commission and questionnaire surveys which were distributed to a sample of passengers and bus drivers. The obtained data was used to compute the performance measures, as well as to develop statistical models to estimate the average waiting time of buses at peak and off-peak hours. The results indicated that the waiting time at off-peak hours was two and a half times the waiting time at peak hours. It was found that 40% of the external bus routes were within the range of overall Level of Service (LOS) C & D, 26.67% between B & D, 13.33% between B & C, 13.33% between C & E and 6.67% between D & E. Also, it was found that 60% of internal bus routes’ LOSs were between C & D, 20% between C & E and 20% with LOS C. It was found that the average perceived waiting time depends on the total travel time regardless of on-peak or off-peak trips. KEYWORDS: Public transport, Bus services, Performance measures, Waiting time, Jordan Valley.

Public Transit Bus Travel Time Variability Analysis Using Limited Datasets: A Case Study

“…Several researchers analyzed the reliability [11] and variability [12] of travel time [7] at various spatial-temporal scales using a variety of data sources [13]. Further, researchers analyzed public transit bus data for estimation and prediction of travel time using statistical [2,14,15], mathematical [14,16], data mining [17,18], machine learning [19,[20][21][22][23][24][25], and hybrid [3,26] approaches and used these predictions to forecast bus arrival time at bus-stops. From the above discussion, it is clear that characterizing travel time and speed is one of the essential tasks for any travel-related analysis.…”