How efficient is your public transport network?
A data-driven approach provides the answer.
We launched our first Rideshare showcase, allygator shuttle, in August 2016 in Berlin. Our goal was to demonstrate how a digital mobility service in which people share rides can improve a city’s mobility offering and make it easier and more convenient for people to get from A to B. Our mission as a company is to overcome today’s challenges of mobility — offering Rideshare as a form of public transport that allows us to reduce traffic in urban areas and connect remote places where people are usually highly dependent on private cars due to the lack of alternatives.
In order to achieve that positive impact, ridesharing solutions — or demand-responsive-transportation (DRT) should be embedded into an existing local transport infrastructure instead of being a simple ‘stand alone’ solution.
With our integrated mobility platform, we enable our partners — public transport companies, local authorities and mobility providers — to launch and operate ridesharing solutions themselves and thus improve their existing infrastructure.
But before we can improve a public transport network, we have to understand how it ticks. And here, data is the key. We want our partners to be confident that they launch ridesharing services where they are needed and with the right operational parameters.
A city’s transport infrastructure is built on very complex systems: buses, trams, metros move thousands of people from A to B. If we include private cars, taxis and solutions like carsharing and bikesharing into the mix, the equation becomes even more complicated.
We want our partners to understand this complex system and how ridesharing fits into the landscape to support them in their decision-making on how to improve their infrastructure.
This is what led us to the development of our Insights web application.
Insights helps us (and our partners) identify gaps in public transport, the mobility patterns of people and how ridesharing fits into the equation to improve mobility.
Supply
To start identifying the gaps of public transport, we need to take a look at the supply, i.e. the current state of the public transport system. We use GTFS data to devise this set of indicators:
- Walking Accessibility — How easy is it to reach a form of public transport within a 5 minute walk?
- Public Transport Coverage — How far can I get in 15 minutes once I am on a train/tram/bus?
- Daily Frequency — Are these stops served frequently?
Industry research and interviews with our clients showed us that the above indicators are the most relevant to evaluate the supply of public transport.
The great thing about Insights is that extra parameters can be added depending on our clients’ needs. Any area’s definition of what a ‘well supplied’ public transport means can be easily incorporated.
Demand
Being able to understand demand is not a new challenge to Public Transport companies. How do we tackle this? By integrating a variety of data sources. The more diverse data we use to analyse a network, the better we can understand that network. Our demand indicators currently include:
- Population Density — Wherever people live, they need to move around and be connected to key areas of a region. Hence this is our basis for indicating demand.
- Car Journeys — using data to get information about where people travel to by car.
- App searches — using data from mobile applications to see what the desired end-to-end trips are.
Based on these data sources, Insights is able to visualise the people’s movement within an area and soon what modes of transport they are using.
Dividing the city into chunks
For Insights we defined equal-sized hexagons with a radius of 250 metres, which provides a granular analysis. The segmentation allows us to analyse any location within a city or an area, whether it is a building, coffee shop, school or work place. We are able to visualise where people are coming from, where they are going to, and how well the current public transport serves them.
Indicators to measure performance
For each hexagon we calculate a numerical score for each indicator. The indicator scores are then normalised so that they can be compared with each other. The overall scores for supply and demand are determined based on the single indicator scores composing them. Nevertheless, not every region with low public transport supply will have a low score automatically.
The supply-demand score is defined as the difference between public transportation supply and the actual demand for transportation.
This means: a hexagon with low public transport supply will have a low score if the demand for mobility is high. If, however, both the supply and the demand for transportation are rather low, it will have a higher overall grade.
In order to easily understand these values, the supply-demand score is classified into a grading system from A to F.
Areas in red allow us to question why demand is not sufficiently met by the supply. And areas in green might provide a good example on what is working to ensure demand is met by supply.
Comparing entire districts
Various hexagons can be aggregated to analyse how an entire district is performing. This also helps to visualise how the PT system of a city or a region performs as a whole.
The conclusions derived are often striking — although PT operators and authorities have a lot of knowledge about their existing customers, it is only thanks to this analysis that they are able to take a more in-depth look more at their potential customers.
By including various data sources, applying relevant indicators and ensuring accurate visualisations, our partners gain new insights into how they could further optimise their network.
Outlook
Right now, we use Insights to identify potential areas for improvement in the public transport system, allowing us to provide our clients with the best data-driven approach for decision making.
With each new city that launches Rideshare, we understand the importance of tailoring solutions that meet each city’s unique needs. Our plan is to grow Insights into an application that can not only plan efficient DRT but offer optimised solutions that suit each individual city.
For us, this is just the beginning.
This blog post is the first part of a series of articles that looks at how door2door’s Insights application evaluates Public Transport.
