Measuring Passenger Travel Time Reliability Using Smart Card Data

Service reliability is a key performance measure for transit agencies in increasing their service quality and thus ridership. Conventional reliability metrics are established based on vehicle movements and thus do not adequately reflect passenger’s experience. In the past few years, the growing availability of smart card data allows shifting the reliability measures from vehicle’s to passenger’s point of view.
This research introduces two new passenger-oriented measures of transit travel time reliability and a method to measure them using on-board smart card transactions data. These measures reflect both punctuality (deviation from the schedule) and predictability (day to day variation) of the service over the selected spatial-temporal scale. The analysis approach and the mathematical formulation are presented and then applied to the public transport network of The Hague, the Netherlands. The developed method can evaluate passenger-oriented reliability at various spatial-temporal levels, from a single origin-destination pair to a network-wide evaluation.