Development of new reliability measure for bus routes using trajectory data

ABSTRACT

The present study is focused on evaluating travel time reliability on six bus routes in Mysore city, southern part of India. The travel time data were tested using three potential statistical distributions, namely Burr, generalized extreme value (GEV), and Log-normal distribution. From the hour of the day variability results, it has been noticed that during the peak hours, the bus travel time variability tends to follow normal distribution. Whereas for the off-peak conditions, k value increases and tends to become highly positive. The major contributions of the present study are (i) to highlight the consideration of the shape parameter (k) of GEV distribution to explain the variability of travel time over space and time on a selected bus route, (ii) to highlight the shortfalls and limitations of existing reliability measures, and (iii) to suggest and justify the use of recently developed reliability measure, RBI for evaluating bus travel time reliability.

KEYWORDS:

• Planning time index (PTI)
• buffer time index (BTI)
• GEV (generalized extreme value) distribution
• travel time variability
• clustering

Acknowledgments

This study is a part of “Development of Indo-HCM” project sponsored by planning commission of India. The authors are very grateful to Central Road Research Institute CRRI Delhi for the same. The authors acknowledge the opportunity to present the research work that forms the basis of this article at the fourth Conference of the Transportation Research Group of India held at IIT Bombay (India) from 17 to December 20 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.