Passengers' perceptions and effects of bus-holding strategy using automatic vehicle location technology

Journal of Advanced Transportation, Fall, 2009 by Shinya Hanaoka, Fayyaz Mahmood Qadir

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Conclusions

This study indicated that current bus passengers in Bangkok, among all income levels, have tendency to continue the use of bus transit if it is frequent and punctual, as more than half of the respondents mentioned. Therefore, they place a higher importance on punctuality of arrival and departure for future GPS-equipped bus service, as revealed from attitudinal survey. Furthermore, they also indicated their great interest in improved safety in travel. When bus punctuality and safety in travel were analyzed with respect to their satisfaction in existing bus service, most respondents were unsatisfied with the punctuality but they were highly satisfied with existing safety in travel. In addition, passengers did not exhibit their willingness for real-time bus schedule information, and coordination of route #73 schedules with other BMTA buses. In view of results from attitudinal survey, this study mentioned that passengers are only evaluating conventional service attributes and only ranking them for future bus service, rather than demanding for modernized services. Hence, there is a need to develop public awareness about the potential benefits of AVL system in bus transit, so that people might understand how beneficial these are and how the AVL system might save them time.

The waiting-time survey revealed that this route faces larger headway variations according to measured headway standard-deviation. It also showed that passengers perceived waiting-times at bus stops were greater than actual ones. The usefulness of a bus-holding strategy, using real-time bus location information, was examined using PARAMICS for different congestion levels. It was shown that there were ample opportunities for improvements for bus transit passengers and operators if the existing congestion decreases in Bangkok. Based on results obtained from the waiting-time survey and PARAMICS, the deployment of AVL systems in Bangkok have been found to offer potential benefits both to bus transit passengers and providers.

This study leads towards many possible future research directions. There is sufficient evidence about actual and perceived waiting-time, which motivate for a comprehensive data collection across other bus routes in Bangkok to develop a model. Modeling could be refined by considering transfer time between routes and passengers' arrival time flexibility at destination.

Received: June 2006 Accepted: May 2007

Acknowledgments

Authors are grateful to Dr. Paul Firmin, University of Leeds for discussion on statistical analysis, as well as to anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

References

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