Fingerprint of a bus route
Visualisation: William Teo | Analysis: Lin Zhaowei
There are over 280 public bus routes in Singapore with more than 3 million trips made each day on average.
Route lengths and travel times vary widely. Buses on some trunk routes take more than two hours to get from end to end, while most feeder buses make short loops of less than an hour.
How is each bus route here utilised? Using over 500 million EZ-Link transaction records from September 2014, we map out the “fingerprint” of every public bus service in Singapore.
Taking the example of bus service 2, we plot out all the stops of direction 1 as dots, and show the main roads where the stops are located.
We then reposition the dots and lines along a semi-circle arc.
We then add lines to the diagram to show the total number of journeys between every pair of bus stops. The thickness and height of each line represents the number of trips between these two stops, compared to the rest of the journeys on this bus service.
For example, this line shows the journeys from Blk 65 along New Upp Changi Rd to Bedok MRT Station. As this connection has the highest ridership along Bus 2 for this direction, the line is the thickest and highest.
When all the journeys are drawn, this is how the “fingerprint” looks:
We do the same thing for Direction 2, which gives us a full circle:
Now that you understand how each “fingerprint” is constructed, here is how one of them looks like:
Browsing through the “fingerprints” for many of the bus routes, we can observe a few common patterns.
1. Different ridership on weekdays and weekends
Typically, most bus routes are busier during weekdays. For example, Bus 179, a loop service between Boon Lay interchange and Nanyang Technological University, has almost twice the ridership on an average weekday, compared to Saturday.
But there are also bus services with no discernible differences in ridership between different days of the week. Bus 133, which runs between Ang Mo Kio interchange and Shenton Way, is one such example.
2. Different peaks on weekdays and weekends
Typically, most bus routes are busier during the morning peak from 6am to 9am on weekdays. On weekends, they get busier after 9am as people go out later in general. This can be observed both for trunk and feeder bus services.
For example, such a pattern can be seen for Bus 174, which has higher ridership in the late mornings and early afternoons during weekends.
3. Higher usage closer to bus interchanges and train stations
Unsurprisingly, a sizeable number of trips are made to or from train stations. Relatively few trips span the entire bus route.
For example, Bus 166 has the highest ridership in the portions closest to train stations — Ang Mo Kio, Novena, Little India, Dover, City Hall, Harbourfront and Clementi.
4. Some bus routes have distinctive breaks
There are often “clusters” of high ridership — often around train stations. For example, for Bus 51, one of the longest public bus routes in Singapore, the travel profile suggests that the route can possibly be broken into one segment running between Jurong East Interchange and The Japanese School at West Coast Road and another running the rest of the way.
Cutting bus routes could possibly reap greater efficiency, but transport planners would then face the challenges of managing the impact to existing commuters. They would have to consider the availability of suitable terminating points to accommodate the proposed amended routes.
What other insights can you glean from this visualisation? Do you have other ideas on visualising this dataset? Let us know at feedback@data.gov.sg.
