Excess journey time (EJT), the difference between actual passenger journey times and journey times implied by the published timetable, strikes a useful balance between the passenger’s and operator’s perspectives of public transport service quality. Using smartcard data, this paper tried to characterize transit service quality with EJT under heterogeneous incidence behavior (arrival at boarding stations). A rigorous framework was established for analyzing EJT, in particular for reasoning...

Passenger incidence (station arrival) behavior has been studied primarily to understand how changes to a transit service will affect passenger waiting times. The impact of one intervention (e.g., increasing frequency) could be overestimated when compared with another (e.g., improving reliability), depending on the assumption of incidence behavior. Understanding passenger incidence allows management decisions to be based on realistic behavioral assumptions. Earlier studies on passenger...

Automatic data collection (ADC) systems are becoming increasingly common in transit systems throughout the world. Although these ADC systems are often designed to support specific fairly narrow functions, the resulting data can have wide-ranging application, well beyond their design purpose. This article illustrates the potential that ADC systems can provide transit agencies with new rich data sources at low marginal cost, as well as the critical gap between what ADC systems directly offer...