Name: Sensitivity analysis of historical bus travel times and improving travel time estimations in bus scheduling
Start: 2025-05-26T10:30:00-0400
End: 2025-05-26T10:50:00-0400

Welcome to CTRF’s 60th Annual Conference! Enjoy Ottawa

Monday May 26, 2025 10:30am - 10:50am EDT

Desmarais 3105

Good transit travel time estimates are important for transit planning and operations. Most existing literature focuses on predefined statistical distributions, analysis levels, or specific elements of transit travel times, but less on how various elements interact with each other and cause variations in the overall travel times. This study aims to address these research gaps by decomposing observed transit travel times, identifying how much variation can be attributed to each element and their interaction effects using sensitivity analyses, and demonstrating potential ways to improve bus schedules.

The analyses show that red-light waiting times are heavily affected by trip departure times and their interaction effects, where a few minutes of change can greatly affect the red times and overall travel times due to the varying cycle lengths in fixed signal timing plans. Therefore, historical travel time observations are conditional based on signal synchronizations given their departure times and planners must plan for the different signal synchronization patterns when adjusting bus schedules. To help plan for red time variations, we demonstrate some simple calculations the planners can perform to improve travel time estimations in a newly developed schedule by incorporating signal timings compared to the current practice of applying historical observations.

Speakers

Martin Trépanier

Full Professor, Polytechnique Montréal and CIRRELT

Martin Trépanier is a civil engineer and professor at the department of mathematics and industrial engineering of École Polytechnique de Montréal, an engineering school affiliated to the Université de Montréal. He is the titular of the Chair in the transformation of transportation... Read More →