Travel Time and Transfer Analysis Using Transit Smart Card Data

Automatic fare collection systems using smart card technology have become popular because they provide an efficient and cost-saving alternative to the manual fare collection method. In 2004, the City of Seoul, South Korea, introduced a smart card-based transit fare scheme, which was a distance-based, integrated fare collection and calculation system. Over the years, the system was extended twice and now can provide detailed information about public transit use in the region. This information includes each trip's boarding and alighting times and locations, as well as the connected trip chains with transfers. This paper examines possibilities for using such data for transportation planning application. First, a process to generate a travel time map is presented. For this, more than 100 million trip data are used to estimate travel times among stops. It is also demonstrated that transfer data can be readily obtainable because the on- and off-boarding information reside in the data set. Although transfers are considered to be important information for public transit planning, it has not been easy to collect such information. This study illustrates that transfer data can be used to locate the critical transfer points that need improvement. It is also demonstrated that a simple data query can quickly identify these locations. In addition, transfer trip patterns between two zones are analyzed, which provides meaningful information about passengers' transfer location choice.