Analysis Of Bus Passenger Travel Characteristics Based On Trip Chain

Understanding the travel characteristics of passengers is basis of bus demand acquisition, bus network optimization and public transportation system construction,which helps the traffic planning department to make decisions. Meanwhile, with the development of intelligent public transportation systems and the rapid increase of data acquisition in depth and breadth, massive data have been accumulated from the transit operation, which will provide data basis for the building of trip chain to analyze passengers’ travelling characteristics. Mainly based on bus IC card data, along with basic data of bus and subway system, we can build the public transportation trip chain and then analyze passengers’ travelling characteristics via data association and data analysis.Firstly, this paper introduces the structure and processing methods of multi-source data including bus IC card transaction data, the location of bus and subway stations,subway running time and transfer time. The first step of data processing is data cleaning and data restoration to improve data quality. Then in order to get the matching bus IC card data and bus transit transfer site table, a data association algorithm is used to process the multi-source data.Based on the definition and classification of public transportation trip chain, the study proposes an algorithm to build the public transportation trip chain under different travel modes. Based on the bus IC card data, the algorithm determines the time and space conditions for the transfer between bus and bus, bus and subway. The study also provides the method to calculate important parameters in the algorithm. In the study,actual survey data were used to determine the proportion of transfer, the transfer time was calculated according to the definition of the formula, and a generalized cost model based on transfer time was used to determine travel time of the specific subway trip.Finally, the feasibility of the algorithm was verified by using some data for trip chain building.Based on the algorithm above, the Beijing bus IC card data were used to build the trip chain in different travel modes and periods and the bus passenger travel characteristics were analyzed in the study. Passengers’ travelling choices were deducted through the personal trip chain analysis. Then, statistical analysis of macro travel characteristics was implemented according to the structural characteristics of trip chain.The analysis indexes include time distribution characteristics of travels throughout the day, the calculation of travel time and travel distance, the transfer characteristics and the spatial distribution characteristics of travels. The case study indicated the good applicability of trip chain building algorithm in practice, as well as good data support passengers’ travelling characteristic analysis can provide for urban transit planning and operation management.