Utilisation of electronic fare collection data of urban bus operators with regard to transfer journeys and origin / destination estimation

Abstract

The understanding of an urban public transport network from an operational point of view and the understanding of passenger’s travel patterns become increasingly important due to the growing complexity of most networks. Large cities heavily depend on their public transport networks as urbanisation vastly increases. One way of obtaining more factual knowledge of network’s performance measures and passenger travel patterns is to analyse Electronic Fare Collection (EFC) data which are recorded when buying or validating tickets. Dublin’s main urban bus operator, Dublin Bus, records trip level data from passengers that use a ticket that is valid for a period of time. Such tickets have a unique identifier for the validity period which allows to analyse travel paths of individual passengers. Over 45 million individual passenger boardings were recorded over a two year period.