Unsupervised approach towards analysing the public transport bunching swings formation phenomenon

Journal Article (2020)
Author(s)

Viktoriya Degeler (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)

Léonie Heydenrijk-Ottens (TU Delft - Transport and Planning)

Ding Luo (TU Delft - Transport and Planning)

Niels van Oort (TU Delft - Transport and Planning)

Hans van Lint (TU Delft - Transport and Planning)

Transport and Planning
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12469-020-00251-z
More Info
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Publication Year
2020
Language
English
Transport and Planning
Issue number
3
Volume number
13 (2021)
Pages (from-to)
533-555
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Abstract

We perform an analysis of public transport data from The Hague, the Netherlands, combined from three sources: static network information, automatic vehicles location and automated fare collection data. We highlight the effect of bunching swings, and show that this phenomenon can be extracted using unsupervised machine learning techniques, namely clustering. We also show the correlation between bunching rate and passenger load, and bunching probability patterns for working days and weekends. We present the approach for extracting isolated bunching swings formations (BSF) and show different cases of BSFs, some of which can persist for a considerable time. We applied our approach to the tram line 1 of The Hague, and computed and presented four different patterns of BSFs, which we name “high passenger load”, “whole route”, “evening, end of route”, “long duration”. We analyse each bunching swings formation type in detail.