The Effect of Daylight on Reliability of Transit Service: Case Study of the Melbourne Tram Network

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of seasonal variation of daylight hours on the reliability of public transport service using an extensive data set of Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) records. The hypothesis tested is that travel time varies between days where sunrise is after 7 am on a dark winter day and before 7 am on a light summer day. The datasets used were AVL of Melbourne trams (streetcar) in 2010 and the sunrise observations for the same period. All trips were made between 5:00 am to 9:00 am by four routes on the peak direction to Melbourne Central Business District (CBD). A linear regression model was developed, where tram travel time was the independent variable. The predictors (independent variables) were schedule travel time, time difference between 5:00 am to sunrise and time difference between 5:00 to trip start time. Results indicate that daylight start time has a small but statistically significant effect on service travel time. The effect might be explained by travelers leaving home with later departures when it is darker than when it is light. This may result in increased traffic congestion, and as a result, raise travel times for the Melbourne streetcars which operate mainly in mixed traffic. A potential implication of this research is that transit timetables should be adjusted based on seasonal changes of daylight to improve travel time reliability. Environmental as well as congestion effects are demonstrated to impact service reliability.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.