Evaluation of ITS Technology for Bus Transit Systems

Recently, bus transit service providers have begun to adopt Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Mobile Data Terminals. These systems taken together have the potential to reduce the cost of providing transportation services through the execution of real-time control strategies, performance monitoring systems and data collection to support service realignment. We evaluate bus control strategies using ITS against those without ITS. Two levels of ITS are considered: (1) system with centralized tracking and (2) system with information on connecting passengers, as well as centralized tracking. For those strategies using ITS, we develop methods to forecast bus arrival times to a stop and the number passengers on board the bus. Results of a simulation analysis show that the ITS based strategies have the potential to improve connectivity between origins and destinations while reducing passenger waiting times.