Determination of Urban Public Transport Demand by Processing Electronic Travel Ticket Data

Abstract

Determination of transport demand is one of the key factors to solve many transportation problems. Existing methods for obtaining information about passenger mobility have significant shortcomings; currently, methods based on the collection, integration and analysis of big data (Urban computing, big data) are being increasingly used.
Within the framework of this approach, a methodology has been developed for determining the passenger traffic by public transport from the operations of validating electronic travel tickets: smart cards, transport cards, magnetic cards, mobile phones or other electronic devices (Electronic Gadgets), their details are recorded in the Automated Fare Collection (AFC).
In this work we have taken into account that the passenger can travel one, two or more segments before paying for the trip. On some routes, payment is made at the end of the trip.
The article presents a methodology based on defining and evaluating the set of acceptable variants of the connectedness of the passenger trips' sequence, which takes into account many factors that influence the choice of travel routes by the passenger. For example, unlike existing solutions, the possibility of paying for travel at any point of the route is taken into account, not necessarily immediately after boarding the vehicle.
Approbation of the considered methodology was carried out on the data of the Krasnoyarsk public transport system for April 2019. It has been proved that passenger traffic from the validation of electronic travel tickets allows us to estimate the parameters of public transport demand within the limits of acceptable statistical errors.