Understanding what elements influence a bus driver to use headway regularity tools: case study of Santiago public transit system

ABSTRACT

The effectiveness of the control strategies applied in real-time to maintain regular headways between buses, especially those operating without schedules, requires the driver to execute the instruction from central control. This work aims to understand how drivers approach the tools that seek to control the regularity of the headways. Our study is conducted on the Transantiago, the public transport system of Santiago in Chile. Buses operating two routes of this service provider have been equipped with a headway control tool that provides drivers instructions to improve headway regularity. Our results show experienced drivers (over 50 years) perceive being faster and maintaining more regular headways than younger ones. They also appear to be more reluctant to use onboard headway control tools. Less experienced drivers recognize the accuracy of the information delivered and assure that it has improved their driving performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Bus driver
• headway control tool
• regularity
• survey

Acknowledgements

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Kari E. Watkins hosted Yerly Martínez-Estupiñan for a short-term scientific internship in which he designs the survey under joint supervision with Juan Carlos Muñoz and Felipe Delgado. Material preparation and data collection were performed by Yerly Martínez-Estupiñan, and data analysis was performed by all authors. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Yerly Martínez-Estupiñan, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Centro de Desarrollo Urbano Sustantable, CEDEUS (Conicyt/Fondap 15110020), the Bus Rapid Transit Centre of Excellence funded by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF), the FONDECYT project number 1150657 and the scholarship funded by CONICYT for Ph.D. studies (CONICYT-PCHA/Doctorado Nacional/2015).