United States Department of Transportation
i
Evaluation of bus transit reliability in the District of Columbia.
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2013-11-01
[PDF-1.68 MB]
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Abstract:Several performance metrics can be used to assess the reliability of a transit system. These include on-time arrivals, travel-time
adherence, run-time adherence, and customer satisfaction, among others. On-time arrival at bus stops is one of the performance
metrics of the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMATA). A bus is considered to be on time by WMATA if it arrives at
most two minutes earlier or seven minutes later than the scheduled arrival times, with a performance goal of 78%. Most regional
transit agencies consider arrivals that fall within one minute earlier or five minutes later than the scheduled arrival times as being
on time. The goal of this project was to determine the on-time performance and their statistical significance based on WMATA’s
advertised threshold and the industry standard for on-time arrivals. Fifteen bus routes in Washington DC with several stops were
studied in this research. WMATA’s published bus schedules provided expected arrival times. An on-board manual survey was
conducted from June 2012 through June 2013 for peak morning and afternoon travel on those routes during which the actual
arrival times at the bus stops were noted and compared with the scheduled arrival times. For WMATA’s two-minutes-early and
seven-minutes-late arrival threshold, the buses were found to be on time approximately 82% of the time, on average, during the
morning. In the evening, for the same threshold, only 68% of the buses on average were considered to be on time. This results
in an overall on-time performance of 75%, which is a modest improvement over the 2010 on-time performance of 74%. Based on
the one-minute-early and five-minutes-late arrival threshold used by several regional transit agencies, the buses were found to be
on time approximately 67% of the time during the morning and 55% in the evening, resulting in an overall performance of 61%.
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