An Effective Use of Tokyo Metro Passengers Flow by Visualization of Smart Card Ticket 'PASMO' Origin-Destination Data for Public Transport Network to be Sustainable

This paper explores the possibility of improving operation and service of the Tokyo Metro system based on large scale trip records of smart card PASMO. Understanding accurate passengers' flow is important for Tokyo Metro to provide sustainable services. Though we already have several statistics such as transportation census, they do not have recent and temporal traffic information. The lack of such information makes it difficult to verify long-term demand forecast, to understand gaps between passengers’ behavior and operators’ plan, and to dynamically predict demand in case of big events. Trip records of PASMO, which is originally used for fare calculation, enable us to grasp detailed and temporal passengers’ flow. We have analyzed four years’ worth (410 million) records of PASMO, and have developed a visualization system for examining passengers’ flow every ten minutes. We show several findings obtained from our analysis and visualization. First, we describe verification of estimated transportation statistics in the case of opening a new line. Second, we depicts unexpected phenomena and their reasons that lead operators to construct solutions. Finally, we show the analysis of passengers’ flow in the events such as train suspension by typhoon, which reveals problems of train operations that brought heavy congestion. These lessons would help to construct countermeasures for better transfer operations and services.