Headway-based evaluation of bus service reliability

One major component of bus service is service reliability, which is also concerned by passengers. Enhancing the service reliability can improve the quality of transit service and satisfaction of customer, and attract additional ridership. An analysis was made based on the collected automatic vehicle location (AVL) data of bus routes from Shanghai and Jiangyin city. This analysis provided a deep insight into the assessment of bus service reliability based on the analysis of headway. The paper gives quantitative analysis of the commonness and otherness of headway among different lines, and emphasizing three characteristic parameters of headway: average values, variances and range for the improvement of the evaluation of bus service reliability. Subsequently, through the sample data from Shanghai and Jiangyin, the idea has been applied into practice to check whether it is possible and reliable. The results indicate that the analysis of headway data can be the reference to assessment of bus service reliability.