Measuring Bus and Bus-Passenger Travel by Road Segment

A transportation system is not just the sum of its parts but also how and where those parts interact with one another. Measuring the effectiveness of that interaction contributes to everything from understanding the overall system to analyzing key components at the most disaggregate level of the system possible – in this case, the segments of roadway between stops. This presentation will show how analysts at TransLink developed a new foundational dataset by combining three existing datasets: Compass travel, the road network, and our bus location data. This new dataset describes bus and passenger travel at the street-segment level. We will walk the audience through three phases: how the need for the model was identified and what data considerations were important to success; the FME workflow process and some important lessons learned, and how the end results are being used to visualize and analyze our system in all-new ways. The emphasis will be on the FME process where data was pulled from multiple sources/types, assets/services were snapped and aligned, and the spatial relationship between assets and services were analyzed to produce the final output deliverables. Sections and Segment relationships are maintained, and attributes are easily aligned with other datasets such as route patterns, speed limit, vehicle type, frequency, on-time performance, etc.