Busviz Big Data For Bus Fleets

Transit agencies in major cities make hundreds of decisions every day on how to best allocate scarce resources. How adequate and reliable is service on a given bus route? When should capacity be added and how should a bus route serve a neighborhood? Transit planners make decisions by using whatever information is available. This information includes ground surveys, public feedback, and a large element of experience and intuition.

This project introduces BusViz, a web-based application that helps bus service operators and transit regulators to make better decisions by using large streams of field data to monitor and visualize the performance of bus fleets. We describe the system architecture and user interface of the application and illustrate how the Singapore Land Transport Authority is using it to iterate and evaluate ideas with data-driven rigor and to share quality of service statistics with various stakeholders.

Joint work with the Public Transport Quality Division of the Singapore Land Transport Authority. Special thanks to Liu Feng-Yuan and Tan Lijun.

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A Anwar, A Odoni, N Toh: BusViz: Big Data for Bus Fleets. Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting 2016, Jan 10 – 14, Washington DC, USA (paper)

A Anwar, A Odoni, N Toh: BusViz: Big Data for Bus Fleets. Transportation Research Record, Vol 2544, Issue 1 (paper)