Planning & Policy
Much of the Transit Lab research has been focused on developing methods and tools to support planning and decision-making within transit agencies by making better use of data from automated data collection systems, including automatic fare collection, automatic vehicle location and automatic passenger counting systems. The central tool developed as the foundation for these improvements, known as ODX, infers the origin-destination travel patterns for individual public transport passengers on the system, connecting their journey segments into “linked” journeys, which are aggregated to form a seed origin-destination matrix, which is then expanded to represent the aggregate travel of all public transport passengers. The resulting expanded origin-destination matrix forms the foundation for many planning and decision support methods, as well as facilitating measurement of system performance attuned to the passengers’ perception of service quality, including service reliability at the origin-destination level, which is a critical element in modal choice for many individuals.
Specific methods building on ODX include bus network design (with applications in London and Boston), decision support for rail and bus service control both under disrupted and normal conditions (with applications in London, Boston and Hong Kong), and the design of integrated urban transport systems including both fixed route, scheduled bus and demand responsive, shared-ride and autonomous vehicle operations (with applications in London, and Chicago).