Is bus bunching serious in Sydney? Preliminary findings based on Opal card data analysis

 

By Bobby Du & Paul-Antonin Dublanche

 

An efficient and reliable public transit system plays an important role in mitigation of congestion and attraction of more users from private car. However, sophisticated traffic condition and dynamic travel demand often make public transit services unstable and uncertain, which results in longer waiting time especially during peak hours or special events. One common phenomenon called bus bunching (BB) or platooning usually happens when the headway between successive buses arriving at the same bus stop is less than the scheduled headway or a certain threshold. BB is a major source of congestion, which not only causes passengers’ travel time delayed and extra waiting time, but also degrades the bus operation performance. Most of the prior researches on BB were limited in a single or multiple bus lines, consequently, only a few studies were found that focused on the whole bus network in a city or even larger region. Recent advances in big data create new opportunities for exploring BB problem in a large-scale scope.

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Infrastructure and people

nick-tylerBy Professor Nick Tyler

We often talk about infrastructure – these days increasingly about smart infrastructure – but how often do we pause and think about what ‘infrastructure’ is for – or what ‘smart’ is? We think about roads and railways, energy, communications and water infrastructure as serving some purpose, such as moving traffic from A to B, or supplying sufficient energy to keep the lights on, but there is a more fundamental question: why do we need to do these things? Given the amount of money (that should be) invested in infrastructure, perhaps we should be asking such a fundamental question before we start proposing what should be built. Continue reading