Active commuting provides routine-based regular physical activity which can reduce the risk of chronic diseases. Using public transportation involves some walking or cycling to a transit stop, transfers and a walk to the end location and users of public transportation have been found to accumulate more moderate physical activity than non-users. Understanding how public transportation characteri...

A public transit network differs from a general road network. The passenger flow of bus stops and the limited capacity of buses have a greater effect than road traffic flow on the running time of buses. As a result, conventional public transit assignment models that adopt the econometric road network path concept have numerous limitations. Based on the analysis, the generalized bus trip time ch...

This paper seeks to understand extreme public transit riders in Beijing using both traditional household survey and emerging new data sources such as Smart Card Data (SCD). We focus on four types of extreme transit behaviors: public transit riders who (1) travel significantly earlier than average riders (the ‘early birds’); (2) ride in unusual late hours (the ‘night owls’); and (3) commute in e...

Background: Travel reliability is a critical dimension in the user experience of public transportation services. Next only to travel time, commuters in the Chicago metropolitan area identified reliability as the second most important factor that affects their mode and route choice through a survey conducted by Northwestern and the CTA in a previous CCITT study (Nie, Wu, Zissman, Lee & Haynes 20...

Passengers, transit managers, adjacent businesses and residents, and local governments all can have strong, and sometimes conflicting, ideas about what makes a good transit stop or station. This paper examines stops and stations from the transit agency’s perspective; transit managers must consider both the logistical and political factors inherent to transit operations as well as the perspectiv...

To attract people to use public transport, efficient transit information systems providing accurate, real-time, easy-tounderstand information must be provided to users. In this paper we introduce HapticTransit, a tactile feedback based alert/notification model of a system, which provides spatial information to the public transport user. The model uses real-time bus location with other spatial i...

The social functions of urbanized areas are highly dependent on and supported by the convenient access to public transportation systems, particularly for the less privileged populations who have restrained auto ownership. To accurately evaluate the public transit accessibility, it is critical to capture the spatiotemporal variation of transit services. This can be achieved by measuring the shor...

Recently, transit agencies have been opening up their route configuration and schedule data to the public, as well as providing online APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to real-time bus positions and arrival estimates. Based on this infrastructure of providing transit data over the internet, we developed an algorithm to calculate the travel times of K-shortest paths in a public transpor...