Investigation of the parameters of the public urban bus movement and the passengers flows

Abstract

For long time, most of the big cities have serious problems of congestion in the streets because of the high use of private vehicles, which means also more pollution and traffic accidents, among others. Therefore, for over many years ago and up to nowadays has been investigating in order to improve the quality and service of the public transportation and thus make it more attractive for the people. Since the people spend very much time going to work, university, etc., a very important aspect for the traveller is his travel time. This includes the time going to and from the bus stop, waiting and travel time. These times may be optimized and reduced with and effective route and with a good commercial speed of the bus as well. This project is focused on investigating some aspects of transport engineering of the urban bus route number 43 of the city of Kaunas, Lithuania. In order to do it, the study is performed for several time periods in a weekday and on Saturday. The research intends to analyze four factors: the speed of the vehicle along the route, the passenger’s flow, the passenger travel distance and the passenger travel time. In the experimental research it is obtained data of passengers flow throughout the route; and, in order to get data of bus speed we have a GPS which is able to store files at high frequency. The results indicate that the vehicle speed is not affected by the load; however it might be significant when comparing average bus speeds of the streets. The calculations give an average travel distance on the vehicle equal to 4,79 km and an average travel time - including walking and waiting time - nearly 24 minutes. About passengers’ flows, they are localized in a small time interval during the morning peak time. However, in the afternoon the passengers come back home during more prolonged time and often without peaks of flow.