Measuring the quality of public transit system Tapani Särkkä Petri Blomqvist Ville Koskinen

Background Projects for Helsinki City Transport and in a DART-project More recently, a project for Ministry of Transportation and Communication –To measure the planned quality of public transit system As a result, a quality measurement system has been developed

What is it and what it does? An EMME/2-model Basis on deterministic assignment Generates virtual passengers from each zone to each zone Analysis of two way trips possible

Example - Commuters Arrival to the job at 8:00-9:00 am, departure 8.5±0.5 hours later Search for optimal paths for the virtual passengers by deterministic assignment –The arrival time is varied 8:00, 8:01,..., 9:00 –When a new one-way connection is found, search for an optimal path for return trip Different types of two-way trips can be analyzed

The quality indices of supply For each OD-pair the average of –Total transit times and its components –Transit speed in km/h or in relation to the auto speed –Number of boardings –Headway Number of transit connections between the OD-pairs

Indices of supply vs. demand For each O/D weighted average of the indices –Weighting by total demand or transit demand Visualization of the OD-pairs that have low values of the index value but high demand ENIF for visualizations

Connections to a destination

Average speed by destinations

No connections (OD-pairs)

Lowest traveling speed

Averaging can be dangerous! Two example schedules: The std or minimum of the index Example 1Example 2 08:05 08:0608:20 08:35 08:36…E[hdw]=15 min08:50…E[hdw]=15 min Example 1Example 2 std=14 min; max=29 minstd=0 min; max=15 min

Tulosten visualisointi

Transit speeds (km/h)

Number of boardings

Walking times (min)

Uses of the measurement system Analysis of planned quality of transit system Monitoring it when the supply and the demand change ENIF can be configured as an interactive decision support system that is easy to use The demand matrix makes the measurement system very useful Cost/benefit analyses …