Data-driven spatio-temporal analysis of public transportation usage in a metropolitan area

Smart card automated fare collection systems are used in many transportation systems throughout the world as they provide effective and reliable payment opportunity. Smart card automated fare collection systems facilitate efficient and accurate fare collection in public transport systems. These systems enable the planners to implement more flexible pricing structures compared to traditional fare collection methods. Smart card systems record several pieces of data about the passengers, which can be used to improve the overall efficiency and service quality of the public transport network. In this work, we focus on analyzing smart card transaction data to understand spatial and temporal travel patterns of public transport passengers in Ankara, Turkey. One of our primary goals is to identify origin-destination pairs where the passengers are required to transfer through one or more intermediate points because of the lack of a direct service. We use a data set of about 30 million records corresponding to a one month period. The data includes records from bus and light rail transportation modes. Each record includes the smart card number, the transport mode, the bus/rail line, the boarding location, the boarding date and time, and the fare class of the passenger; but lacks the alighting location of the passenger. We first create a model to estimate the alighting location of each passenger. Then, we estimate origin-destination flows and their breakdown by several dimensions such as fare class, transportation mode, day of week, time of day and the frequency of the lines and the stations used. The estimation of alighting location of the passenger and the travel analysis are performed using RStudio program. Smart card data set of passenger travels on one-month period are analyzed according to smart card type; adult, student and teacher tickets. The most preferred public transportation vehicle is the bus with the usage rate of 61% in travels, the least preferred public transportation vehicle is the cable line. In addition to the travels on weekdays and weekends, density of the transit travels are analyzed according to time of day and frequency of the lines and the stations used. Keywords: Transportation, Public transport, Smart card data, Data analytics, Spatio-temporal analysis.