The frequency of incidents negatively changes public perception with regard to the public safety in transit systems. The level of safety expressed as performance measures, ensures contractors and users that a quality safety level is maintained. Both the private and public sectors in the U.S. annually report accurate data to the National Transit Database (NTD) to be used in assessing the progres...

The market for the public transit fare payment system using contactless smart cards is rapidly growing, however, the payment systems provided by different vendors are not interoperable. This paper presents an interoperable payment protocol for the public transit fare payment system using contactless smart cards. We also present implementation results of a PSAM (Purchase Secure Application Modul...

When the safety community designs their systems to also maintain security properties, it is likely that public-key encryption will be among the tools that are applied. The security guarantees of this technology are based on a particular model of computation. We present the properties of this model that are relevant in the setting of distributed systems. Of particular importance is that the mode...

Current route planning algorithms for public transport networks are mostly based on timetable information only, i.e., they compute shortest routes under the assumption that all transit vehicles (e.g., buses, subway trains) will incur in no delays throughout their trips. Unfortunately, unavoidable and unexpected delays often prevent transit vehicles to respect their originally planned schedule. ...

There is ongoing debate over the relative advantages of rail and bus transit investments. Rail critics assert that cities which expand their bus transit systems exhibit better performance than those that expand rail systems. This study examines those claims. It compares public transport performance in U.S. urban areas that expanded rail transit with urban areas that expanded bus transit from th...

Public transit ridership offers valuable opportunities for modest amounts of daily physical activity (PA). Transit is a more feasible option for most Canadian commuters who live too far from work to walk or cycle, yet public transit usage in midsized Canadian cities has historically remained low due to inefficient transit service. The objectives of this longitudinal study were threefold: to ass...

We studied transit ridership from the perspective of the transit provider, with the objective of quantifying the influence of transit system operational attributes, transportation system infrastructure attributes and built environment attributes on the disaggregate stop level boardings and alightings by time of day for the bus transit system in the Montreal region. A Composite Marginal Likeliho...

w bile the United States has been investing in costly park-and-ride systems that have made transit increasingly dependent on the automobile, European and Japanese communities have been strengthening the potential for people to walk and bicycle to and from transit, boosting ridership at a far lower cost. In Japan and much of Europe, the fastest-growing and often predominant access mode to suburb...

Many scholars claim that public transit’s long-term ridership decline can be attributed to the decentralization of U.S. metropolitan areas and the decline of the central business district (CBD) as their primary economic engine. However, recent research has begun to challenge this view and has prompted this reexamination. Using multivariate analysis, we examine the relationship between the stren...