Investigating the factors affecting the waiting times of urban public transportation passengers: Denizli case

Today, due to the rapid increase in the population and its concentration in cities, existing settlements and structures are insufficient and new settlements are needed. With the new settlements, the existing transportation problems increase even more as the living spaces move away from each other and the population increases. People's desire to move intensively in order to reach their needs such as education, work, health and social activities causes traffic congestion. Especially with the increase in the use of individual vehicles, traffic congestion has become an important problem to be solved. One of the useful ways to reduce traffic congestion is to expand the use of public transportation systems. In developed countries, the importance of public transportation is known in order to solve traffic problems and to be environmentally friendly, and studies are carried out to expand public transportation. Although there are many factors that affect people's preference for public transportation, the waiting time of passengers at bus stops is an important component. Reducing and accurately estimating the waiting time of people who spend a significant part of the day in traffic can change people's perspectives on the use of public transportation and improve the quality of public transportation systems. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the widely used assumption in the literature that the waiting time of passengers at bus stops is half of the time between vehicles making consecutive trips (headway). It is also investigated whether there is a significant relationship between waiting time and factors such as age, travel purpose, bus information system usage. For this purpose, waiting times of passengers at some selected bus stops in Denizli city were measured and a questionnaire survey was conducted. After the data obtained were analyzed statistically, it was observed that there were significant differences between the expected waiting time of passengers and the actual waiting time, especially for low frequency bus services.