Intermodal passenger flows on London's public transport network : automated inference of full passenger journeys using fare-transaction and vehicle-location data

Urban public transport providers have historically planned and managed their networks and services with limited knowledge of their customers’ travel patterns. While ticket gates and bus fareboxes yield counts of passenger activity in specific stations and vehicles, the relationships between these transactions—the origins, interchanges, and destinations of individual passengers—have typically been acquired only through costly and therefore small and infrequent rider surveys. Building upon recent work on the utilization of automated fare-collection and vehicle-location systems for passenger-behavior analysis, this thesis presents methods for inferring the full journeys of all riders on a large public transport network. Using complete daily sets of data from London’s Oyster farecard and iBus vehicle-location system, boarding and alighting times and locations are inferred for individual bus passengers, interchanges are inferred between passenger trips of various public modes, and full-journey origin–interchange–destination matrices are constructed, which include the estimated flows of non-farecard passengers. The outputs are validated against surveys and traditional origin– destination matrices, and the software implementation demonstrates that the procedure is efficient enough to be performed daily, enabling transport providers to observe travel behavior on all services at all times. Thesis Supervisor: Nigel H.M. Wilson Title: Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Thesis Supervisor: Harilaos Koutsopoulos Title: Professor of Transport Science, Royal Institute of Technology Thesis Supervisor: John P. Attanucci Title: Lecturer & Research Associate, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Intermodal Passenger Flows on London’s Public Transport Network Automated Inference of Full Passenger Journeys Using Fare-Transaction and Vehicle-Location Data by Jason B. Gordon Submitted to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on August 10, 2012 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degrees of Master of Science in Transportation and Master in City Planning Acknowledgements The research that culminated in this thesis evolved over a three-year period, during which I was extremely fortunate to have the guidance of multiple faculty members. Nigel Wilson and John Attanucci guided this work from its inception. Their intuitive knowledge of transit, standard of academic excellence, and complementary analytical styles guaranteed stimulating and fruitful discussion at each weekly meeting. Haris Koutsopoulos brought a similarly valuable perspective to the latter half of the project: his expertise and ingenuity strengthened the methodologies of Chapters 3 and 4 while providing the guidance to overcome the challenges addressed in Chapter 5. Haris and Nigel’s detailed reviews of the manuscript greatly strengthened it—their interest and close attention are sincerely appreciated. Jinhua Zhao played a key role in guiding the early stages of this work, and the vision that he instilled was in mind throughout the project. Fred Salvucci kindly reviewed the manuscript as well. His policy insights were invaluable as always, and I’ll miss his thoughtful weekly provisioning of yucca donuts. This work would not have been possible without the support of Transport for London (TfL). Shashi Verma, Lauren Sager Weinstein, and John Barry provided the invaluable opportunity to work with and learn from their exceedingly talented teams, while their own feedback and support for the project were truly encouraging. Andrew Gaitskell answered countless arcane technical questions and extracted mountains of data. James McNair explored the algorithms and the code itself, lending a welcome (and clever) second perspective in what had previously been a solitary endeavor. Malcolm Fairhurst and Tony Richardson presented an opportunity to test this research with a real-world problem, while Duncan Horne, Mark Roberts, Carol Smales, Mark Butlin, David Warner, Liam Henderson, Geoffrey Maunder, Dale Campbell, and Tim Cooper shared expert insights about all aspects of TfL and its data. The staff of London Buses were equally instrumental in this project. Steve Robinson shared his unparalleled iBus expertise and, along with Nigel Hardy, Lisa Labrousse, Aidan Daly, and George Marcar, generously and patiently answered complex technical questions. Steve and Kevin Field tediously extracted large volumes of data, Annelies de Koning created indispensable data extraction tools, and Bob Blitz and Fergus McGhee shared their expert knowledge of the bus network. Alex Phillips and Keith Gardner developed a user-requirements framework which strengthened and refined the tools developed in this research. Special thanks to Rosa McShane for her friendship and hospitality, and for always handling logistic and bureaucratic issues. Additional support was provided by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering through a Schoettler fellowship and a teaching assistantship, in which I had the rewarding experience of teaching with and learning from George Kocur. Tomer Toledo gave valuable feedback on the scaling problem, while Ginny Siggia and Kris Kipp guided me expertly through all manner of institutional hurdles. This project grew from an initial collaboration with Albert Ng, whose talents and creativity are as valued as his friendship. Mike Frumin generously sacrificed hours of thesis-writing time to share his (locally) unparalleled knowledge of London’s transport and information systems, while Winnie Wang and Yossi Ehrlich similarly lent their code, data, and methodological insights. Kevin Muhs exemplified the virtue of patience with his cheerful (and brave) de facto alpha testing, which yielded many valuable discoveries and suggestions (among many mutual tangential but welcome diversions). Gabriel Sánchez-Martínez shared his IPF source code, and helped vet scaling algorithms through numerous stimulating whiteboard discussions (which also benefitted from the insights of Sam Hickey, Nihit Jain, and Kari Hernandez). These and the other transit-lab students of 2010–2013 made the countless hours in the office far more enjoyable. Lastly, thanks to my family for their encouragement and support, and to Dini for absolutely everything. The work in these pages was sustained by your love and sacrifice.